The Booker Prize and the best of Beryl Bainbridge
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
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
About the Author
Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine. Although Bainbridge was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, she never won. Some degree of correction occurred in 2011 when, after a public vote, her 1998-shortlisted novel Master Georgie won a one-off prize, The Man Booker Best of Beryl.Other nominated books by Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge’s masterly evocation of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters, in all his wit and glory.
Beryl Bainbridge’s fictional history chronicles the fate of the privileged passengers of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage.
A darkly perceptive coming-of-age tale set in a Liverpool the 1950s from Beryl Bainbridge, tied together at the end with her trademark skill.
Surprises abound in Beryl Bainbridge’s unsettling comic novel, praised by fellow author Graham Greene as both ‘outrageously funny and horrifying’.
The mundane and the macabre collide in Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly comic tale about the shockingly unexpected consequences of a young girl’s heartbreak.
