About the Book
From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of "The Line of Beauty: " a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate--a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance--to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried--until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.
Rich with Hollinghurst's signature gifts--haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism--"The Stranger's Child" is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.
Review :
"A sly and ravishing masterpiece. . . . The novel skips with indecent ease through 100 years of British political and literary history, concealing its mighty ambition in charm and louche wit. It's a devastating history of gay love, erasure and resilience. It's also a ripping yarn, a simple love (or rather, lust--Hollinghurst's characters are too Wildean for love) story as literary whodunit: "Brideshead Revisited" crossed with "Possession." . . . Behind the bloom of Hollinghurst's prose, another project quietly unfurls. As much as "The Stranger's Child" is about England and Englishness, about war, about the impulse toward biography, it's profoundly and unmistakably a secret literary history. It's the tapestry of British literature turned around to reveal its seams, to reveal that the history of the British novel has been the history of gay people in Britain. It's Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and the entire Bloomsbury set, a history--as Cecil's is--of inv
"The success of "The Line of Beauty" meant that Alan Hollinghurst's next book was surely going to be eagerly anticipated. But the seven-year wait for "The Stranger's Child" and the steady unfurling of its ambition over the novel's 435 pages has had another effect too. It has dawned on people that Hollinghurst, the gay novelist, might also be the best straight novelist that Britain has to offer--that is, the writer whose talents sit most comfortably within the contours of the form. . . . "The Stranger's Child" stands comparison to Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" for the way that the sweep of the narrative, its simultaneous flicker of comedy and drama, is matched and sustained by the precision and the leisurely economy of its individual sentences . . . "The Stranger's Child "spans almost a century. And here, too [as in his previous books] sex opens up the novel, though the thing unlocked is not the small, cloistered world of Edwardian privilege but of all English literary history. T
"The Booker Prize-winning author's new novel covers a century and traces a love triangle torn from the pages of "Brideshead Revisited ," though at least one side of the triangle is addressed more directly than Waugh did in his classic tale. With ambition and scope Hollinghurst uses a 'love in wartime' narrative to explore the deep and wildly complicated connections between memory and what passes for history."
--"Publishers Weekly" Top 100
"A running motif in this witty and ultimately very moving novel is that certain truths--like the gay relationships of that earlier time, perhaps all human desires--are unrecordable and, to some extent, unknowable. The past and the present form a kind of palimpsest that leaves neither wholly legible. The book raises many such ideas, but they sit lightly on the page and never dampen the vibrant pleasures of Hollinghurst's prose or his sparkling dialogue. There are echoes of E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen and others, but "The Stranger's Child "is a Great English Novel in its own right, and a tantalizing read."
--Tom Beer, "Newsday
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"[Hollinghurst] is a writer who revels in the long form. This time he even seems to re-invent the form. "The Stranger's Child "has an exceedingly clever structure; it's essentially five big set pieces, separated by time and history, that take us from 1913 to the present. . . .[It] is both an up-to-date narrative and one of those old-fashioned family sagas with a gay twist . . . Hollinghurst brings to life with enormous skill seances, dinner parties, walks in the woods, children's theatricals, memorial services, interviews, a weekend in a great house. . . . A tour de force."
--Andrew Holleran, "The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide
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"The questions of who wants to keep the past buried and who will finally tell the truth and risk being vilified are essential to Hollinghurst's remarkably textured tale of historical misconceptions. . . . Writing with a surgeon's precis
From the UK:
"Brilliantly written, intricate and wide-reaching . . . An almost century-long cavalcade of changing social, sexual and cultural attitudes, exhibited in sensuously imagined scenes and scrutinized with ironic wit . . . Marvelously acute in its attention to idioms and idiosyncrasies, tone and body language, psychological and emotional nuances, the book gives intensely credible life to its swarm of characters . . . Masterly in its narrative sweep, richly textured prose and imaginative flair and depth, this novel about an increasingly threadbare literary reputation enormously enhances Hollinghurst's own. With "The Stranger's Child, "an already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular."
--Peter Kemp, "The Sunday Times" (London)
"Not only Alan Hollinghurst's most ambitious novel to date, but also his funniest since "The Spell" . . . Hollinghurst is perhaps our most literary contemporary novelist, in the sense that his books are . . . playfully, bu
From the UK:
""The Stranger's Child "is something of a dichotomy: epic in scope, but minute in its details. . . . To say it is eagerly awaited is like saying JK Rowling is a tad popular. . . . "The Stranger's Child "does not disappoint. A study on fame and the passing of time, it is as compulsive as anything [Hollinghurst has] written. It begins with a weekend at the Sawles' family home in 1913, and the arrival of a poet named Cecil Valance who writes a poem that becomes lauded after Winston Churchill quotes from it. Over the following decades, a variety of journalists and biographers try to piece together what happened that weekend to inspire such a book. . . . Buy it, then relish and bathe in every word. [This] novel warrant[s] obsessive appreciation of every line"
--James Mullinger, "GQ" (UK)
"From the Hardcover edition."
