Unsworth was born on 10 August 1930[1] in Wingate, a mining village in County Durham, England, to a family of miners.

However, when his father was 19, he travelled to the United States for a few years and on returning to Britain entered the insurance business and thus began moving his family up the economic ladder and out of the mines.

In the last years of his life, he lived in Perugia, a city in the Umbria region of Italy, with his second wife, a Finnish national.

"...in my earlier novels, especially the two written in the early '70s, The Hide and Mooncranker's Gift, there was a baroque quality in the style, a density.

Among my earliest influences as a writer were the American novelists of the deep south, especially Eudora Welty, and some of that elated, grotesque comedy stayed with me."

In addition to Eudora Welty, he counted William Faulkner and Carson McCullers as his major influences.

Reflecting on this shift, Unsworth explained: "Nowadays I go to Britain relatively rarely and for short periods; in effect, I have become an expatriate.

A film version directed by James Dearden, starring Charles Dance, Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley, as the title character, was released in 1988.

The two main characters are cousins Erasmus Kemp, son of a wealthy merchant from Lancashire, and Matthew Paris, a physician and scientist who goes on the voyage.

The novel's central theme is greed, with the subject of slavery being a primary medium for exploring how selfish desire for profit can result in evil and barbarism.

The narrative interweaves elements of appalling cruelty and horror with extended comedic interludes, and employs frequent period expressions.

"[5] Some critics have attacked historical fiction as being un-literary, for example James Wood writing in The New Yorker called it a "somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness.