The highly acclaimed New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 1998 and Booker Prize Nominee that reinvents the historical novel from Beryl Bainbridge, the distinguished author of The Birthday Boys and Every Man For Himself. A misadventure in a brothel links the destiny of the enigmatic George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer, to a foundling who becomes his obsessively devoted maid, a wily street boy who takes advantage of his sexual ambiguity, and his alternately philosophical and libidinous brother-in-law in this terse, searing novel that takes them from the comfortable parlors of Victorian Liverpool to the horrific battlefields of the Crimean War. "An exquisite dissector of human folly" - Time "Striking ...in its companionable alliance between wry, deadpan humor and nightmarish horror" - New York Times Book Review "Master Georgie can be read in an hour or two, yet it may reverberate in the reader's consciousness long after its poignant final page. " - Boston Globe "Easily the most impressive novel I've read this year, and my admiration for it is unqualified. " - Mordecai Richler, National Post (Canada) "Remarkable ...A tour de force of compressed plotting ...by turns funny and appalling" - New York Times "A memorable novel" - Atlantic Monthly "Stunning" - The New Yorker "A virtually flawless blend of elegant prose, ironic observation, and impeccably controlled narrative momentum" - Publishers Weekly (starred review)