The Strangers Child Alan Hollinghurst by Alan Hollinghurst 9780307398437, 0307398439, B00500YCCC instant download after payment.

Alan Hollinghurst’s masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes over a century of change. Powerful, absorbing and richly comic.

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 link the families forever, having the most lasting impact on George’s 16-year-old sister, Daphne. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance, and the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story, retold and interpreted in different ways by successive generations.

"Thankfully the real drama of the novel lies elsewhere. In interviews Mr Hollinghurst has said he finds it irksome, rightly, to be ghettoized as a gay novelist, and while “The Stranger’s Child” is a moving social history of gay life in Britain over the last century — in different hands it might be called “Gay Men and the Women Who Marry Them” — it is, more universally, a story of people trapped in the wrong life: “It was something extraordinary they were doing, he and Cecil, a mad vertiginous adventure.” Among the sometimes bloodless English male novelists of his generation, he is the one whose cleverness is least in conflict with his ability to make the reader feel as well as see the story."  -  Emma Brockes, The New York Times

Alan Hollinghurst is a novelist, poet, short story writer and translator.  He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. The Sparsholt Affair was published in 2017.