Read by Nigel Anthony.

[2005] Julian Barnes' Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is based on Arthur
Conan Doyle's extraordinary real-life fight for justice. Arthur and George
grow up worlds and miles apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur
in shabby-genteel Edinburgh; George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire
village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in
Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age; George
remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are
brought together by a sequence of events which made sensational headlines at
the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. George Edjali's father is Indian, his
mother Scottish. When the family begins to receive vicious anonymous letters,
many about their son, they put it down to racial prejudice. They appeal to
the police, to no less than the Chief Constable, but to their dismay he
appears to suspect George of being the letters' author. Then someone starts
slashing horses and livestock. Again the police seem to suspect the shy,
aloof Birmingham solicitor. He is arrested and, on the flimsiest evidence,
sent to trial, found guilty, and sentenced to seven years' hard labour.
Arthur Conan Doyle, famous as the creator of the world's greatest detective,
is mourning his first wife (having been chastely in love for 10 years with
the woman who was to become his second) when he hears about the Edjali case.
Incensed at this obvious miscarriage of justice, he is galvanised into
trying to clear George's name. With a mixture of detailed research and vivid
imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case,
but the inner lives of these two very different men. The reader sees them
both with stunning clarity, and almost inhabits them as they face the
vicissitudes of their lives, whether in the dock hearing a verdict of guilty,
or trying to live an honourable life while desperately in love with another
woman.

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