Born 90 years ago, the much-loved Dame was shortlisted five times for the Booker Prize - the most that any author has been shortlisted without actually winning

Master Georgie
Written by Beryl Bainbridge
- Shortlisted
- The Booker Prize 1998
- Published by Duckworth
Buy the book
Beryl Bainbridge explores the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures - and hidden secrets - of her enigmatic central character
When George Hardy, a 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 are driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt.
Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine
More about Beryl Bainbridge