Product Description

'Beryl Bainbridge gets better and better ...she has succeeded with a daring leap of emphatic imagination in penetrating the minds of Captain Scott and the four men he led to their deaths in Antarctica in 1912' Patrick Skene Catling, Evening Standard THE BIRTHDAY BOYS is classic Bainbridge - one of her absolute best. It is a fictional account of Captain Robert Scott's 1910 expedition to Antarctica told from the perspectives of five men on the voyage: Scott; Petty Officer Taff Evans; ship's medic Dr Edward Wilson; Lieutenant Henry Bowers; and Captain Lawrence Oates.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5136 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
'Bainbridge's account of the horribly familiar story is both fresh and sure-footed. The power of her imagination, her clarity of expression and mastery of language are more striking than anything else I have read this year' Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph 'A beautiful piece of story-telling. Far more accurately than any biography could do, it catches what must have been Scott's hold on his followers' Andro Linklater, Spectator 'Her darkest work, equally convincing in tis evocations of the icy, unendurable landscape without, and the chilling interior landscapes of damaged souls' Penny Perrick, Sunday Telegraph 'She writes of the hideous deprivations so boldly endured; the astounding beauties of the Antarctic landscapes; the personality clashes; the emotional reticences ... It seems to me that Beryl Bainbridge has quite surpassed herself in a completely new imaginative direction' Mary Hope, Financial Times

About the Author
Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays, she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, and has won many literary awards including the Whitbread Prize and the Author of the Year Award at the British Book Awards.

Customer Reviews

Stunning.
This is very possibly the best book I have read. I greatly admire Bainbridge's writing, but even she has here surpassed herself. Her prose is spare yet precise and her writing is so skilful that she tells you everything in an astonishingly few words. She blends fact and fiction so convincingly that the reader is there with these poor men. Brave yet foolhardy, loyal yet desperate, she brings their famous and tragic story to life in a way I have never before encountered. A short book and one which you savour, trying to make it last, yet knowing that you will soon have finished it and go right back to the beginning to read it again. READ IT!

A Great Book
As good a read as anyone could want. Beryl Bainbridge captures the essence of Scott and his colleagues, their preparations for the trip and the enormous (& fatal) challenge they took on. For me the book brought the people on the expedition to life.

A Chilling Masterpiece
All my life I've been fascinated by polar expeditions. I read this novel several years ago, and still get goosebumps thinking about the point-blank loneliness and utter misery of these men...and about the sad conceit of the whole expedition. But the novel is more than just a chilling travel story - it explores the extremes of lost-ness.