INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The Stranger's Child is Alan Hollinghurst's masterpiece, the book that cements his position as one of the finest novelists of our time. In its scope, intelligence and elegance, The Stranger's Child can be placed in the great tradition of the novel alongside epics by Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell. And yet, in its subtly political exploration of homosexuality in English society, it deals with an utterly contemporary subject in an utterly contemporary way. The Stranger's Child begins ...
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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER The Stranger's Child is Alan Hollinghurst's masterpiece, the book that cements his position as one of the finest novelists of our time. In its scope, intelligence and elegance, The Stranger's Child can be placed in the great tradition of the novel alongside epics by Marcel Proust and Anthony Powell. And yet, in its subtly political exploration of homosexuality in English society, it deals with an utterly contemporary subject in an utterly contemporary way. The Stranger's Child begins with sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle sitting in a hammock in the garden of Two Acres, the family home in suburban London. She is making a show of reading Tennyson before her brother George arrives to visit with his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a handsome, assured and sometimes outrageous young man with a burgeoning reputation as a poet. After a tantalizing and dramatic weekend Cecil writes a long poem in Daphne's autograph album as a parting gift. It is titled "Two Acres," and both Daphne and George (whose feelings for Cecil also go well beyond mere friendship) immediately see how important the poem is - but none of them can foresee the complex and lasting effects it will have on all their lives. When the next section of the novel begins, everything has changed: Daphne is married to Cecil's brother Dudley Valance; George to a historian named Madeleine; and Cecil is dead, killed by a sniper in World War One. A Cabinet officer and man of letters named Sebastian Stokes has come to Corley Court, the Valance family's country home, to put together an edition of Cecil's poems and speak to each family member in turn about him. He is especially curious about Cecil's personal (and passionate) letters and unpublished poems, papers that seem to have gone missing, and whose absence will loom paradoxically through the rest of the novel. The book leaps forward and we are at another party, this one to celebrate Daphne's seventieth birthday. George is now the acclaimed historian G.F. Sawle; Daphne's son Wilfrid, a charming boy in the previous section, has grown into a nervous and somehow fractured adult. We meet Peter Rowe, a music teacher at the boarding school that now occupies Corley Court, and his boyfriend, Paul Bryant, a bank employee with a feeling for Cecil's poetry. Soon Paul is taking up an idea that Peter abandoned: to write a biography of Cecil Valance. It means making some startling discoveries about a past that the Valance family would prefer to keep in sepia and shadows. The Stranger's Child is by turns a gripping literary mystery, an absorbing social study of some pivotal moments in history, and a sensuous and beautiful exploration of the secret passions that determine our lives. From Edwardian suburbs to the offices of the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s, from High Table wit to the realities of life working behind the counter at a provincial bank, it seems there is no corner of English life that Alan Hollinghurst cannot make present and palpable. Throughout this book he displays his unmatched gift for creating characters who live and breathe, and makes The Stranger's Child that rare thing, a historical novel whose characters, in their passions and betrayals, constantly surprise the reader. In telling the story of the Valances, Hollinghurst casts a clear eye on the ways that each new generation tries to keep the family's secrets buried - and reminds us that outsiders who try to dredge secrets to the surface have their own very mixed reasons for doing so. Reading this book, we are so utterly immersed in its characters' lives that their memories come to seem like our own, at once vital and in the process of being lost. And perhaps this is the novel's most extraordinary quality: the way it gives us events as they happen, and then shows them being transformed in the memory, and transformed again
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Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $6.70, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $12.99, very good condition, Sold by A Good Read rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Toronto, ON, CANADA, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
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Seller's Description:
Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket. 0307398420. A Good Read ships from Toronto and Niagara Falls, NY-customers outside of North America please allow two to three weeks for delivery. Light edgewear.; 9.10 X 6.60 X 1.40 inches; 448 pages.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $12.99, good condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $15.00, like new condition, Sold by carl clark rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Naples, FL, UNITED STATES, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $17.99, very good condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $17.99, good condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $17.99, fair condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child: a Novel to cart. $18.00, very good condition, Sold by Hourglass Books rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Vancouver, BC, CANADA, published 2011 by Knopf Canada.
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Very Good in Very Good, Not Price Clipped jacket. Book First North American Edition stated on verso of title page; some edge wear to boards and dust jacket; otherwise a solid, clean copy with no marking or underlining; collectible condition.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $30.00, very good condition, Sold by Between the Covers-Rare Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gloucester City, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf.
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Near Fine in Near Fine jacket. First North American edition. Light bumping at the spine ends, else near fine in a near fine dust jacket with corresponding bumping. A novel.
Add this copy of The Stranger's Child to cart. $35.00, like new condition, Sold by Between the Covers-Rare Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gloucester City, NJ, UNITED STATES, published 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf.
The Strangers Child see's Alan Hollinghurst at the height of his literary genius. Set over nearly a century, the book opens with the arrival of a minor poet whom over the years has a effect on friends, family and Biographers down the years.
The novel is essentially about memory, love and loss.
Alan Hollinghurst is on top form here, and I highly recommend this 'Booker Prize' winning author of 'The Line Of Beauty' to everyone.
