The Stranger's Child: Picador Classic

Description

With an introduction by Anthony Quinn 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. Powerful, absorbing and richly comic, The Stranger's Child is a masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes over a century of change.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of 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.

With The Stranger's 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 Stranger's Child is to be cherished -- John Banville