Barnes, Julian - Arthur & George

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 becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham.  Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity.  But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as the Great Wyrley Outrages.  With a mixture of intense 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 differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

Condition:  Good