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Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize It is the late summer of the last year before the first Great War. Cecil Valance, a beautiful young aristocratic poet, is visiting Two Acres, the home of his Cambridge friend and lover, George Sawle. On his departure, Cecil leaves a poem, dedicated to George's younger sister Daphne, which when published becomes a touchstone for a generation, symbolizing an England in its final glory. Meanwhile Daphne has also become involved with Cecil's family, visiting their Victorian Gothic country house, Corley, and developing a relationship with Cecil's brooding, manipulative brother, Dudley, that will link the families for ever. The Stranger's Child begins as a novel about two families and two houses: by the time it reaches its profound and moving conclusion, it has become an epic tale told in five parts covering almost a hundred years. Like The Line of Beauty, this is a deliciously funny novel, glittering with acute observation and arch insight into the worlds of those who belong and of those who are excluded, of carefully hidden secrets which are finally, dramatically revealed.
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.
Format: Book (Paperback)
ISBN13: 9780330513968
Published: July 2011
Number of pages: 340
Width: 234 mm
Height: 153 mm
Audience: General/trade
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Country: United Kingdom
English writer Alan Hollinghurst is often classified as two things: the Henry James of his time, and an acute chronicler of gay experience in London.
His latest work, “The Stranger’s Child”, is his first since winning the Booker prize for “The Line of Beauty”.
Beginning in the summer of 1913, the opening chapter is told through the eyes of sixteen year old Daphne Sawle, whose brother George invites his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance to their property, “Two Acres”, for a weekend. Unexpectedly, Cecil writes Daphne a poem, making her the lucky recipient, as he could not so easily give it to her brother George, with whom he is having a passionate affair.
There is something reminiscent of McEwan’s “Atonement” in the opening scenes; the young girl with her nose in a book, a stately but not extravagant house and the remains of a sexual secret which continues to have repercussions for decades to come.
And so, the lives of the Sawles and Valances become irrevocably linked from that weekend, remaining so for the remainder of the century. Each new chapter is told through the eyes of some new character – someone irrevocably linked to Daphne in some distant way or other, or someone writing about the ill-fated poet, Cecil Valance. Many of these characters seem to disappear and reappear throughout the novel.
Hollinghurst’s words seem especially to evoke a strong sense of place - the buildings and architecture he describes throughout, regarding both “Two Acres” (Daphne and George’s childhood country home) and Corley Court (Cecil’s family estate, full of nooks and crannies, and the thin shadows of the woods beyond the homestead) almost appear to be characters themselves.
For those who have a need to know what comes next, this book may become frustrating, with its continual disjointedness; still, it is an intriguing look at seeing how we, as humans interpret and re-interpret events that happened in the past.
“The Stranger’s Child” adds to Hollinghurst’s distinguished body of work, if not for its plot, then certainly for its wonderful use of the English language.
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