Forty years later, retiree Tony Webster slowly comes to new realizations about a tragic event from his early twenties and the part he played in what happened. After his first girlfriend leaves him for one of his best friends, said friend winds up taking his own life shortly after. And then, life moved on. Tony traveled around, got married, had a kid, got divorced, worked a steady job for forty years and retired. He’s put Veronica and Adrian mostly out of his mind until a […]

The unlikely duo in the title of Julian Barnes’s novel are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and George Edalji, a mixed-race son of a vicar who becomes the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Barnes follows each of them from their beginnings in life until the point at which circumstances conspire to throw them together. Sir Arthur’s life story is better known, but Barnes goes all the way back to the beginning when Arthur, son of a wastrel, resolves to make a […]