The Stranger's Child

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Description

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.

Reviews

With The Strangers Child, an already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular * Sunday Times *
I would compare the novel to Middlemarch . . . a remarkable, unmissable achievement * Independent *
Elegant, seductive and extremely enjoyable . . . one of the best novels published this year * Guardian *
Magnificent . . . universally acclaimed as the best novel of the year -- Philip Hensher
Hollinghurst is a master storyteller . . . The Strangers Child is to be cherished -- John Banville
Daring . . . Fresh and vital * New York Times Book Review *
Brilliant . . . Hollinghurst [has] a truly Jamesian fineness of perception . . . [He is] one of the best novelists at work today * Wall Street Journal *
Part social history, part social comedy and wholly absorbing, The Strangers Child does everything a novel should do and makes it look easy * Washington Post *
Beautifully written, ambitious in its scope and structure, confident in its execution, The Strangers Child is a masterclass in the art of the novel * TLS *
The Strangers Child is a comedy of manners, exuberantly funny, as well as a literary mystery * Esquire *
Highly entertaining and, as always with Hollinghurst, the dialogue is immaculate and the characterization first class. . . . Every Alan Hollinghurst novel is a cause for celebration, and this spacious, elegant satire is no exception * Sunday Telegraph *
Fabulously involving and rich. Its also very funny . . . An extraordinary achievement * Spectator *
Elegant . . . affecting, erudite [and written] with tenderness and sensuous immediacy * Observer *
Delightful . . . Tremendously readable and engrossing * Daily Mail *
Perfect . . . Elegant people partying on the edge of the abyss * Financial Times *
Intricate, witty, playful . . . Comedy of manners, investigation of class, changing political and social landscapeall the reliable pleasures that Hollinghursts fiction offers are here * Times *
Ambitious, epic and satisfying * Elle *

Author Bio

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of several novels including The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty and The Stranger's Child. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.