Arthur & George

Now a major TV series starring Martin Clunes, Arsher Ali and Art MalikFrom the winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011, an extraordinary 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, 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. This is 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.

A beautiful and engrossing work, Richly accomplished... Dazzling, Excellent... Meticulously researched and vividly imagined, both gripping and thoughtful, From the first paragraphs we know ourselves to be in the hands of a major novelist... A compelling narrative, beautifully controlled... This novel is Barnes at his best, As ever, Barnes serves up a master-class in character observation, lavishing attention on the minutiae of personality, the subtle and conflicting impulses that drive men and women. Barnes seems equipped to write with humour and elegance about anything he turns his attention to

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.