Master Georgie

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: A masterwork of love, guilt, and friendship set in Victorian Liverpool and Eastern Europe during the Crimean War. Photography is the common thread weaving together three different points of view that span the years from 1846 to 1854. The first "plate" opens with the account of Myrtle, a young orphan girl, as she is taking a photograph of her adoptive father, Mr. Hardy, who has just passed away in Liverpool. The sudden and unsavory circumstances of Mr. Hardy's death bind Myrtle and the other characters of this story together as history propels them toward the frontlines of the Crimean War. Myrtle's adoptive brother, George Hardy, or "Master Georgie" as he is called, is an amateur photographer and handsome surgeon. When he heads east in 1854 to offer his medical services to the conflict raging between Russia and Turkey—a war it seems England will inevitably enter—Myrtle follows him, as does...