Arthur & George

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 100 years ago that was always going to be a gift for the first writer to spot its potential for re-imagining . . . We are in a late-19th century world of fob chains and propelling pencils, of order, duty, and propriety. But dark forces are at work, and the manner in which George becomes a victim of them is all the more shocking for the elegance and restraint of Barnes’s narrative voice . . . It’s like seeing Henry James turned loose on The Shawshank Redemption.