An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge

A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theater's postwar production of Peter Pan: its close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction. (The Times))

Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the gray postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theater company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Treading the boards for the first time is sixteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, ambitious, idealistic, and still overwhelmingly innocent. She falls hard for the rakish, monocled director, Meredith Potter, but, unable to attract his attentions--and not understanding why he's spending quite so much time with their male colleagues--she turns to another colleague to initiate her into the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O'Hara, a dashing leading man who's nursing secrets of his own. When the curtain is up, fantastical entertainment abounds, but backstage a very different drama is playing out: a pitch-black comedy of indiscretion, intrigue, and eventual tragedy.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and dusted with that magical air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice that] lingers around the margins of all of Beryl Bainbridge's] fiction, (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author's very best--and best-loved--novels.

Beryl Bainbridge was the author of seventeen novels. The Dressmaker, The Bottle Factory Outing, An Awfully Big Adventure, Every Man For Himself and Master Georgie were all finalists for the Booker Prize, and Every Man For Himself won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. The Guardian includes The Bottle Factory Outing on their list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. An Awfully Big Adventure was adapted for a film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman.

Beryl Bainbridge died in July 2010.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780715622049
ISBN 10	0715622048
Title	An Awfully Big Adventure
Author	Beryl Bainbridge
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Duckworth Overlook
Year published	1990-09-24
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.