Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful difference between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
| ISBN | 0099492733 | | Pages | 512 | | ISBN13 | 9780099492733
(What's this?) | | Weight (grammes) | 421 | | Publisher | Vintage | | Published in | London | | Imprint | Vintage | | Height (mm) | 198 | | Format | Paperback | | Width (mm) | 129 | | Publication date | 07 Sep 2006 | | Spine width (mm) | 32 | | DEWEY | 823.914 | | Academic level | General | | DEWEY edition | DC22 | |
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" Extraordinary.... First rate.... A cracking good yarn." - "The New York Times Book Review" " An absorbing fictional re-creation of a real-life detective story. . . . A finely evocative historical novel as well as a morally and psychologically astute glimpse into the worlds of two men." - "Los Angeles Times Book Review" " Masterly throughout. . . . The author keeps the reader on edge." - "The Washington Post Book World" " Deeply satisfying. . . . From the first chapter, Barnes has us in his thrall." - "San Francisco Chronicle" " A page-turner.... "Arthur & George" is by far Mr. Barnes's most pressurized novel to date." - "The Wall Street Journal" " Utterly absorbing, beautifully crafted.... Rich and immensely readable.... A stream of flawless, driving sentences.... A great novel." - "O, The Oprah Magazine" " A marvelous book." - "Entertainment Weekly," " A" " His most engrossing novel ever." - Jay McInerney, "The New York Observer"
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A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see.
He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, looked. There was nobody to observe him; he turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him. (read more)
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