Beryl Bainbridge – författare

WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD PRIZE FOR FICTION 1996WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS'' PRIZE 1997''A narrative both sparkling and deep . . . the cost of raising [the Titanic] is prohibitive; Bainbridge does the next best thing'' Hilary Mantel''Brilliant . . . do not miss this novel'' Daily Telegraph''A moving, microcosmic portrait of an era''s bitter end'' The TimesFor the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with luxury, freighted with millionaires and hopefuls. In her labyrinthine passageways the last, secret hours of a small group of passengers are played out, their fate sealed in prose of startling, sublime beauty, as Beryl Bainbridge''s haunting masterpiece moves inexorably to its known and terrible end.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1998SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZEWINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTIONWINNER OF THE WH SMITH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDWhen Master Georgie - George Hardy, 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 mortality, 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.

''A stellar literary event . . . written with panache and an enviable economy . . . the biggest risk of her literary life'' Margaret AtwoodAccording to Queeney is a masterly evocation of the last years of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain''s greatest Man of Letters. The time is the 1770s and 1780s and Johnson, having completed his life''s major work (he compiled the first ever Dictionary of the English Language) is running an increasingly chaotic life. Torn between his strict morality and his undeclared passion for Mrs Thrale, the wife of an old friend, According to Queeney reveals one of Britain''s most wonderful characters in all his wit and glory. Above all, though, this is a story of love and friendship and brilliantly narrated by Queeney, Mrs Thrale''s daughter, looking back over her life.

In the summer of 1968, Rose sets off for the United States from Kentish Town; in her suitcase a polka-dot dress and a one-way ticket. Together with the sinister man known only as Washington Harold, she goes in search of the charismatic and elusive Dr Wheeler - the man Rose credits with rescuing her from a terrible childhood, and against whom Harold nurses a silent grudge.As the odd couple journey across an America on the brink of paranoid disintegration, their journey mirrors that of Robert Kennedy''s presidential campaign. As they draw ever closer to the elusive Dr Wheeler, one hot day in June at the Ambassador Hotel in LA, their search finally reaches its terrible climax.