If ever there was a sentimental favourite for last year's Booker Prize it was this 16th novel from the five times Booker shortlisted Bainbridge who is extremely popular with the reading public and who also enjoys the favour of the British literary establishment. With novels such as the 1997 Booker shortlisted and Whitbread Novel of the Year Every Man For Himself, her intelligently atmospheric retelling of the Titanic disaster juxtaposed with one young man's stark coming of age and this picaresque, almost Dickensian morality play set during the Crimean War, Bainbridge confirms her adriot move from autobiographical fiction and her brisk, wholly original approach to the historical genre. The enigmatic central character is no hero.
Still, he inspires the devotion of the likeable and forgiving Myrtle, one of four narrators, acting as witnesses to the horrors of war, the complexities of shared guilt and those ever human layers of deception.
