Master Georgie - Beryl Bainbridge

When surgeon and photographer George Hardy sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool to offer his services in the Crimea, he is followed by a small caravan of devotees. All are driven onwards towards death and disease by a shared mysterious guilt. Short-listed for the 1998 Booker Prize, "Master Georgie" is a novel of mystery and intensity; of the filth and misery of war; and of the oddities of human behaviour. "Bainbridge has never written better" "Daily Telegraph".