Julian Barnes reading at Elliott Bay February 9, 2006

JULIAN BARNES
Thursday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m.

It has been too many years and too many fine books since award-winning British fiction writer Julian Barnes has paid Seattle and Elliott Bay a visit. He makes this most-welcome return tonight with a splendid new novel, Arthur & George (Knopf). A shortlist finalist for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, this elegant book features two 'real' people, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji at the start of the 20th-century. Then certain 'unreal' things happen. "A beautiful and engrossing work which brings together some classic Barnesian themes (love, identity), introduces some new ones (spirituality, guilt, and innocence) and hangs them all on a real-life miscarriage of justice from a hundred years ago that was always going to be a gift for the first writer to spot its potential for re-imagining." - The Independent.