From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Epoque Paris, via the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi.
In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn in England?
Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives, which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, freethinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life who was the subject of one of artist John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. In this vivid tapestry of people—Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and James Whistler, among many others—place, and time, we see not merely an epoch of glamour and pleasure but, surprisingly, one of violence, prejudice, and nativism with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.
The Man in the Red Coat is, at once, a fresh portrait of the Belle Epoque, an illuminating look at the long-standing exchange of ideas between Britain and France, and a life of a man who lived passionately in the moment but whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time.
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“Barnes peoples his history with a spirited cast of characters, including Sargent and Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, Henry James and Proust, Pozzi’s diarist daughter, Catherine, and unhappy wife, Therese, and scores more. Finely honed biographical intuition and a novelist’s sensibility make for a stylish, engrossing narrative.”
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Kirkus Reviews (starred review)