A Bainbridge classic comes into Abacus paperback for the first time.
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.
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
Beryl Bainbridge is the author of seventeen novels, two travel books and five plays for stage and television. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man for Himself and Master Georgie (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Every Man for Himself was awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. She won the Guardian Fiction Prize with The Dressmaker and the Whitbread Prize with Injury Time. The Bottle Factory Outing, Sweet William and The Dressmaker have all been adapted for film, as was An Awfully Big Adventure, which starred Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.