The Stranger's Child

He thought of what Cecil had said to him in the park and felt his scalp, his shoulders, his whole spine prickle under the sweeping, secret promise. He tiptoed down and slipped into the drawing-room with a nearly dizzy-making sense of the dangers ahead. In 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. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 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.