LoveReading Says
Winner of the Galaxy UK Author of the Year Award 2011.
This is Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. As in The Line of Beauty, his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, The Stranger's Child is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.
At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011.
Sarah Broadhurst
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The Stranger's Child Synopsis
Sunday Times Novel of the Year
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
A magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for everyone, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, and as reputations rise and fall, the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story.
The Stranger's Child is Hollinghurst's masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes. Epic in sweep, it intimately portrays a luminous but changing world and the ways memory - and myth - can be built and broken. It is a powerful and utterly absorbing modern classic.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
Pre-order the new novel from Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings, now.
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About Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud in Gloucestershire, England in 1954 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1995 he was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement.
His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), gives a vivid account of gay life in London during the early 1980s. It was followed by The Folding Star (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). In 1998 he published Spell, a gay comedy of manners.
Hollinghurst's credits include the translation of Jean Racine's 17th century play, Bajazet, which was first performed in 1990.
The Line of Beauty, published in 2004, describes four years of change and tragedy in 1980s Britain; it won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Hollinghurst lives in London.
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