When Master Georgie - 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 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 morality, 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. 'It is hard to think of anyone who understands the human heart as Beryl Bainbridge does . Master Georgie is brief, intense, and remains seared on the mind long after reading. extraordinary' The Times 'A novella-sized miracle of passion and war' Ruth Rendell 'A marvellous, dark, unpredictable novel - her best yet' Kate Kellaway, Observer 'Scintillating . This is a wonderful book: it delights in history and in the eternal vanities, foibles and eccentricities of human nature' Evening Standard.