Arthur & George
A Novel
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3.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician, sportsman, gentleman par excellence and the inventor of Sherlock Holmes; George is George Edalji, also a real, if less well-known person, whose path crossed not quite fatefully with the famous author's. Edalji was the son of a Parsi father (who was a Shropshire vicar), and a Scots mother. In 1903, George, a solicitor, was accused of writing obscene, threatening letters to his own family and of mutilating cattle in his farm community. He was convicted of criminal behavior in a blatant miscarriage of justice based on racial prejudice. Eventually, Sir Arthur ("Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth") heard about George's case and began to advocate on his behalf. In this combination psychological novel, detective story and literary thriller, Barnes elegantly dissects early 20th-century English society as he spins this true-life story with subtle and restrained irony. Every line delivered by the many characters the two principals, their school chums (Barnes sketches their early lives), their families and many incidentals rings with import. His dramatization of George's trial, in particular, grinds with telling minutiae, and his portrait of Arthur is remarkably rich, even when tackling Doyle's spiritualist side. Shortlisted for the Booker, this novel about love, guilt, identity and honor is a triumph of storytelling, taking the form Barnes perfected in Flaubert's Parrot (1985) and stretching it yet again. 100,000 first printing; 8-city author tour.
Customer Reviews
Arthur and George
This book was such a disappointment! I found myself muttering, 'CUT TO THE CHASE!!' throughout. It was written in an awkward, distracting second person and went into excruciating detail from start to non-resolving finish. I would not recommend.