The Sugar Merchant

Hutson-Wiley’s debut, a sweeping portrait of 11th-century commerce, follows an English orphan who becomes a wealthy merchant trading sugar throughout the Mediterranean. Thomas Woodward is eight when Flemish mercenaries murder his family; an Eynsham monk finds him in the woods and brings him to his abbey, where Thomas is educated to be an intellectual and merchant, and also trained in self-defense in order to spy for the Catholic church. He is dispatched to Muslim countries, working under the guise of a sugar merchant, while seeking knowledge of closely guarded advances in Muslim medicine and agriculture; he travels extensively, but homes in on Alexandria and Cairo, centers of trade and learning. Thomas is highly successful in business, partnering with Assad and Jusuf (Muslim and Jewish, respectively) in the burgeoning sugar trade. Hutson-Wiley highlights the partners’ kinship and mutual respect for each other’s faith in conversations and when dealing with business decisions. Though the narrative hits some dull spots in passages about merchandise, trade, and currency calculations that lack the tension of the opening, the story inevitably leads to Thomas’s revelations about love and loss, the meaning of life, and the emptiness of wealth in moments of despair. This complex and fascinating portrait of medieval life will appeal to history devotees.[em] (BookLife) [/em]