Hi Everyone-

Hope you are all surviving your post-holiday comedown pretty well. My car decided to celebrate the New Year with a festive, sparkling display of most of the warning lights on the dashboard. So I write this hovering by the phone, waiting for the mechanic to call with the fateful news. Cross your fingers for me.

If you would like to cure your January blahs, may I suggest Julian Barnes' brilliant new novel Arthur and George? I mentioned it back before the holidays, but said I'd tell you more when it came out. Well, it hit the stores this week, and I can't say enough about how great it is.

The Arthur in this case is Conan Doyle, and George is George Edalji, the victim of one of Victorian England's most spectacular miscarriages of justice. Edjali was accused of a series of bizarre crimes (I won't spoil it) despite being an exceedingly unlikely candidate as the culprit. After meeting him, Arthur Conan Doyle took it upon himself to investigate personally in an attempt to clear Edalji's name.

This is all historical fact, and Barnes works with the real facts, and even the court transcripts, of the case. His own contribution is to put the story into a narrative form as riveting as the best mystery and as beautifully written as a novel can be, and, perhaps most importantly, to imagine the interior lives of the two main characters so completely, and convincingly, that they add a whole new perspective to this tragic historical anecdote. Barnes fits the details of Doyle's life perfectly with his interest in the case, and the emotional climax of the book comes in a scene where Doyle confronts one of Edalji's persecutors, a local police chief whose casual assessment of the case meshes painfully with Doyle's own vulnerabilities. It's perhaps the most powerfully stunning scene I remember reading all year, and it perfectly caps this tour-de-force novel.

So stop by and pick it up today! Arthur and George is featured as a Buyer's Choice, at 20% off. And if you read it, I'd love to know what you think. Please email me at jmurphy@olssons.com.

Best Wishes,

-Joe Murphy, Head Book Buyer