The Man in the Red Coat
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:3rd Jun '21
Should be back in stock very soon
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020*
'A bravura performance, highly entertaining' Evening Standard
The Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending takes us on a rich, witty tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi.
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent's greatest portraits. The commoner was Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist and free-thinker - a scientific man with a famously complicated private life.
Pozzi's life played out against the backdrop of the Parisian Belle Epoque. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019**
What a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness… a master is at work here. -- Rupert Christiansen * Daily Telegraph *
One of his best books, very handsomely published too…[The Man in the Red Coat is] a bravura performance, highly entertaining. -- David Sexton * Evening Standard, Book of the Week *
Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat — and believe me, it’s teeming with delights — stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way… punctuated by the sound of gunshot…[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book. -- Adam Begley * Spectator *
The Belle Époque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siècle tittle-tattle. -- Robbie Millen and James Marriott * The Times *The Best Books of 2019* *
Julian Barnes’s wonderful The Man in the Red Coat surges round Belle Epoque Paris… a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes. An absolute tonic for grey winter days. -- Claire Harman * Evening Standard *Books of the Year* *
Fascinating history, biography and philosophy rolled into one. In The Man in the Red Coat, Barnes is the ideal guide to…a delightful amble through La Belle Epoque… a riveting dissection of an era. -- Martin Chilton * Independent *
This elegant, seductive history is a book best read in the spirit of its times. The Man In The Red Coat is less a lesson than a day-dream of France’s golden heyday. Wrap yourself in a Japanese tea gown, languish on a peacock-print sofa and abandon yourself to fin-de-siècle Paris and the ministrations of Doctor Love. -- Laura Freeman * Mail on Sunday *
As with his masterpiece, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), [Barnes’] new book [The Man in the Red Coat] seems different from anything ever written before. -- John Carey * Sunday Times *
This lavish study of society surgeon Samuel de Pozzi invites us into a world of artists, libertines and medical innovation… [it’s] enjoyably obsessive...biographical detective work. -- Tim Adams * Observer, Book of the Week *
Belle-Epoque Paris comes alive in this biography of a pioneering French doctor, Samuel Jean Pozzi... Barnes, the author of The Sense of an Ending, sketches his subject's life in fascinating detail, including entanglements with Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt. -- Joumana Khatib * New York Times *
ISBN: 9781529112313
Dimensions: 199mm x 131mm x 23mm
Weight: 450g
280 pages