Arthur & George

By Evelyn Whitaker

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST - From the bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes an "extraordinary ... first rate" novel (The New York Times Book Review) that follows the lives of two very different British men and explores the grand tapestry of late-Victorian Britain.

As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later--one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world's most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife--their fates become inextricably connected.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400097037
• ISBN13: 9781400097036
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Real Live Adventure

In ARTHUR AND GEORGE, author Julian Barnes presents the intersection of two lives - one successful and celebrated the other obscure -- until a strange conjunction of events propels each of them into the glaring spotlight of the British judicial system. The famous person is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the unknown and ill-served man is George Edalji, the son of a Parsee Anglican Clergyman and his Scottish wife. Edalji is accused...

A really great read

I ordered this book from the library, and when it arrived I had forgotten what it was about. Therefore, I was well into the book before realizing that Arthur was Conan Doyle, and that the book was based on historical fact. It is so well written as a novel, that it would be unnecessary to know anything about the real figures in the book, but knowing a little makes the book even more rich and complex. I stayed up late reading...

Exploring what defines a man.

Arthur & George is the story of two boys who came of age in late Victorian England. One became a celebrity author; the other, a humble solicitor whose claim to fame should have been a treatise on railway law. We follow their lives from early childhood to the end, experiencing life with them in a time and place far removed from the western world in the twenty-first century. Julian Barnes weaves for us a story, one scene...

Lives Imagined

Julian Barnes, with his usual elegant prose style, imagines the intertwined lives of two real nineteenth century figures, the solicitor George Edalji and the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, most famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. And as befitting a story associated with Holmes, even if at once removed, at the center of this tale lays a mystery. But Barnes, an experienced mystery writer under a nom de plume, has bigger...

Predictably Unpredictable

Having completed the works of many an author chronologically, I have always admired successive maturity amidst those promissory. Julian Barnes is an exception. Each of his novels is an experimentation with the limits to which the definitions of 'fiction' and 'novel' can be stretched. From the uncanny literary critic that he was in 'Flaubert's Parrot', to the ambitious scale of 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters' -...