Rites of Passage

In the early nineteenth century, an old warship carries passengers and emigrants on a long voyage to Australia. Edmund Talbot, a young and confident aristocrat, keeps a journal for his godfather, recording the shipboard world with wit and growing curiosity. Class, rank and religion shape life aboard, and a clergyman on the ship becomes the centre of an unsettling episode. The novel won the Booker Prize and opens a trilogy about the voyage. It is both a comic portrait of manners and a serious study of shame and social power.