Stranger's Child

Sunday Times Novel of the YearLonglisted for the Man Booker PrizeA magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generationsIn the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for everyone, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, and as reputations rise and fall, the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story.The Stranger’s Child is Hollinghurst’s masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes. Epic in sweep, it intimately portrays a luminous but changing world and the ways memory – and myth – can be built and broken. It is a powerful and utterly absorbing modern classic.

With The Stranger’s Child, an already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular, I would compare the novel to Middlemarch . . . a remarkable, unmissable achievement, Elegant, seductive and extremely enjoyable . . . one of the best novels published this year, Magnificent . . . universally acclaimed as the best novel of the year, Hollinghurst is a master storyteller . . . The Stranger’s Child is to be cherished

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of several novels including The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger's Child and The Sparsholt Affair. 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.