Book description
The Sunday Times Novel of the Year 'With The Stranger's Child, an
already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular' Sunday
Times In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge
friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family
home. Filled with intimacies and confusions, the weekend will link the
families for ever, having the most lasting impact on George's
sixteen-year-old sister Daphne. As the decades pass, Daphne and those
around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance,
reputations rise and fall, secrets are revealed and hidden and the
events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story, told
and interpreted in different ways by successive generations. Powerful,
absorbing and richly comic, The Stranger's Child is a masterly
exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes over a century of
change. 'I would compare the novel to Middlemarch . . . a remarkable,
unmissable achievement' Independent 'Magnificent . . . universally
acclaimed as the best novel of the year' Philip Hensher
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four previous novels, The
Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and
The Line of Beauty. 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.
