Master Georgie

Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1998 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE WH SMITH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 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.