Book description
A century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
With an introduction by Anthony Quinn.
The Stranger's Child was a Sunday Times Novel of the Year.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Stranger's Child as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Daphne is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl when her brother’s university friend (and secret lover) comes to visit, the minor poet Cecil Valance, modelled loosely on Rupert Brooke.
Daphne develops a crush and Cecil drunkenly kisses her, an event that means little in itself, except that his death in the First World War puts everything he did in his short life under the intense microscope of fame. As the novel shifts to subsequent generations, that brief visit starts to mean many different things to different people.
Hollinghurst explores the way that secrets, about love, and money, and sexuality, change shape over time.…
From Benjamin's list on historical fiction about famous writers.
If you love The Stranger's Child...
Sufferance
This is a novel about choices. How would you have chosen to act during the Second World War if your country had been invaded and occupied by a brutal enemy determined to isolate and murder a whole community?
That’s the situation facing an ordinary family man with two children, a…
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