Description
Book Synopsis*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020*
'A bravura performance, highly entertaining' Evening Standard
The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi.
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a scientific man with a famously complicated private life.
Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019**
Trade ReviewWhat a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness…
a master is at work here. -- Rupert Christiansen * Daily Telegraph *
One of his best books, very handsomely published too…
[
The Man in the Red Coat is]
a bravura performance, highly entertaining. -- David Sexton * Evening Standard, Book of the Week *
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s
The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s
teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way…
punctuated by the sound of gunshot…
[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book. -- Adam Begley * Spectator *
The Belle Époque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle. -- Robbie Millen and James Marriott * The Times *The Best Books of 2019* *
Julian Barnes’s wonderful The Man in the Red Coat surges round Belle Epoque Paris… a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes.
An absolute tonic for grey winter days. -- Claire Harman * Evening Standard *Books of the Year* *
