The Stranger’s Child

2013 Longlist

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 confustions, the weekend will link the families for ever, but its deepest impact will be 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 rivhly comic, The Stranger’s Child is a masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes over a century of change.

(From Publisher)

About the Author

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.

Librarians’ Comments

A weedy garden of literary mystery and family doldrums set during the First World War, British gentry, and Bloomsbury – elegant and philosophically charged prose.

An impeccably written book in Beautiful prose which explores changing taste, class and etiquette. The novel unfolds the story of the Sawle and the Valance and follows the families through extraordinary changes in their lives and their histories. Highly recommended and a dream to read.

The Stranger’s Child is an elegant, seductive and enjoyable to read.

Witty, nuanced and observant work from a great wrtier working at the height of his powers.

This exquisite, ironic and compassionate evocation of changing England and its social and personal mores impresses one with the author’s sophisticated style, the keen sense of time flowing and artistry of psychological portraits.

Our readers’ choice