Master Georgie

Description

When Master Georgie - George Hardy, surgeon and photographer - sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool for the heat and glitter of the Bosphorus to offer his services in the Crimea, there straggles behind him a small caravan of devoted followers; Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister; lapsed geologist Dr Potter; and photographer's assistant and sometime fire-eater Pompey Jones, all of them driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt. Combining a breathtaking eye for beauty with a visceral understanding of mortality, Beryl Bainbridge exposes her enigmatic hero as tenderly and unsparingly as she reveals the filth and misery of war, and creates a novel of luminous depth and extraordinary intensity.

Promotion info

The book that only she could have written: This brilliant novel about one family's experiences in the Crimean war is now being reissued with a new cover alongside other classic titles from the Abacus list in our 40th Anniversary year with a new introduction by John Banville.

Awards

Winner of Man Booker Best of Beryl 2011 and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Book - Eurasia 1999 and James Tait Black Memorial Book Prizes: Fiction 1999 and WH Smith Annual Literary Award 1999. Shortlisted for Booker Prize for Fiction 1998.

Reviews

Another masterly exploration by an author at the peak of her form ... She was always good at funny dialogue and acute observation of the oddities of human behaviour, but her recent historical explorations have given full reign to her startling powers Daily Telegraph It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does The Times A quirky and compelling book, packed with witty observations and extraordinary characters, which really ought to have won the Booker prize, but missed it by a whisker Daily Mail The economy of Bainbridge's writing, for which she is famous, results in a slender novel with an astonishing range Independent on Sunday

Author description

Beryl Bainbridge wrote seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television, she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and won literary awards including the Whitbread Prize and the Author of the Year Award at the British Book Awards. She died in July 2010.