The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. 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. 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.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of five novels, 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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780330483247
ISBN 10	0330483242
Title	The Stranger's Child
Author	Alan Hollinghurst
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Pan Macmillan
Year published	2011-07-01
Number of pages	576
Prizes	Short-listed for Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2012 (UK), Long-listed for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 (Ireland), Long-listed for Man Booker Prize 2011 (UK)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable