Julian Barnes
National Bestseller
Finalist for the Booker Prize
A Globe and Mail Best Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the 21st Century
From the Booker Award-winning writer comes a true-life tale about a long-forgotten mystery . . .
Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife. Meanwhile, George remains in hard-working obscurity, struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry. But as the new century begins, they’re brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
Written with a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Arthur & George is a masterful novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all, it’s a profound and witty meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
Finalist for the Booker Prize
A Globe and Mail Best Book
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the 21st Century
From the Booker Award-winning writer comes a true-life tale about a long-forgotten mystery . . .
Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife. Meanwhile, George remains in hard-working obscurity, struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry. But as the new century begins, they’re brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
Written with a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Arthur & George is a masterful novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all, it’s a profound and witty meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
