For the avid reader, discerning collector and real Belle Epoque in Paris and Julian Barnes - fan,
a like-new, signed 1st UK edition hardcover copy of
Julian Barnes
The Man in the Red Coat
Jonathan Cape, London / UK, 2019
"The Man 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 with an Italian name, 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 rational and 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, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with
more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.
The Man in the Red Coat is
at once a fresh and original portrait of the Belle Epoque – its heroes
and villains, its writers, artists and thinkers – and a life of a man
ahead of his time. Witty, surprising and deeply researched, the new book
from Julian Barnes illuminates the fruitful and longstanding exchange
of ideas between Britain and France, and makes a compelling case for
keeping that exchange alive." (penguin.co.uk)