Alan Hollinghurst

The Stranger's Child

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, George Sawle. When Cecil writes George's sister which will become a touchstone for a generation it creates an evocation of an England about to change forever.

Jane McCullough

Excellent on so many levels: prose, structure, complexity, multiple levels. Even with its sometimes less than likable characters, I felt compassion for most, each in his/her own way as they make their way through the world in which the lived.

Joshua Line

Nicholas Barnard

Steve Parks

Kate Hall

Jacob Mishook

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

The Stranger's Child

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