Sailing to Australia in the early years of the nineteenth century, Edmund Talbot keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back in England. Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, sinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks.Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'c'sle something happens to bring him into a ‘hell of degradation’, where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.
This week's book is Rites of Passage by William Golding and we'll not be meeting at The Fletcher Moss on William Street in Didsbury but will be meeting online — contact us for details.
