Sunday Times Novel of the Year
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
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 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 , 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.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
Buy Our Evenings, the new novel from Alan Hollinghurst, now in paperback.