Master Georgie (Winner Of Wh Smith Literary Prize)

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.

Review:
'It is hard to think of anyone now writing who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does' THE TIMES '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 of description ... Bainbridge has never written better' DAILY TELEGRAPH

Prizes:
Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 1999.
Winner of Commonwealth Writer's Prize Best First Book Eurasia 1999.
Winner of James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction) 1999.
Shortlisted for Commonwealth Writers Prize 1999.

Author Biography:
Beryl Bainbridge is one of the greatest living English novelists - author of 16 novels, 2 travel books and 5 plays for stage and television. Her last novel, EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.