WRITER'S BLOCK

The name of the British novelist Barry Unsworth rings only a vague bell for American readers. But it should ring louder. He won England’s Booker Prize in 1992 for Sacred Hunger, a work of fiction that deserved high literary honors. And his 1988 Sugar and Rum, which has just been published here in the United States, proves equally compelling.

Sugar and Rum is an intensely revelatory, semi-autobiographical novel — which hardly sounds like a recommendation, given the confessional goo so often bottled as literature these days. And it is as well something of an untidy book: Hardly any plot, for example, manages to appear except in the observations and memories of Benson, the story’s world-weary protagonist.