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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BOOK AWARDS 2020*

'An absolute tonic for grey winter days' Evening Standard

The 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, 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...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2019** What a deliciously intelligent entertainment this is, couched in a prose of enviable suppleness... a master is at work here. -- Rupert Christiansen * Daily Telegraph * One of his best books, very handsomely published too... [The Man in the Red Coat is] a bravura performance, highly entertaining. -- David Sexton * Evening Standard, Book of the Week * Do not google Samuel Jean Pozzi. If you want to enjoy Julian Barnes's The Man in the Red Coat - and believe me, it's teeming with delights - stay away from search engines and trust the author to tell the story in his own way... punctuated by the sound of gunshot...[this is a] brilliant, defiantly unconventional book. -- Adam Begley * Spectator * The Belle Epoque is brought to life through three colourful lives in this sparkling account stuffed with top fin-de-siecle tittle-tattle. -- Robbie Millen and James Marriott * The Times *The Best Books of 2019* * Julian Barnes's wonderful The Man in the Red Coat surges round Belle Epoque Paris... a story full of digressions, white peacocks, missing limbs, amusing adverbs and fantastic clothes. An absolute tonic for grey winter days. -- Claire Harman * Evening Standard *Books of the Year* *

The Man in the Red Coat