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The Stranger's Child

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty

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About this listen

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 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.

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.

Pre-order the new novel from Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings, now.

 Family Life Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Fiction

Critic reviews

With The Stranger’s Child, an already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular
I would compare the novel to Middlemarch . . . a remarkable, unmissable achievement
Elegant, seductive and extremely enjoyable . . . one of the best novels published this year
Magnificent . . . universally acclaimed as the best novel of the year (Philip Hensher)
Hollinghurst is a master storyteller . . . The Stranger’s Child is to be cherished (John Banville)
Daring . . . Fresh and vital
Brilliant . . . Hollinghurst [has] a truly Jamesian fineness of perception . . . [He is] one of the best novelists at work today
Part social history, part social comedy and wholly absorbing, The Stranger’s Child does everything a novel should do and makes it look easy
Beautifully written, ambitious in its scope and structure, confident in its execution, The Stranger’s Child is a masterclass in the art of the novel
The Stranger’s Child is a comedy of manners, exuberantly funny, as well as a literary mystery
Highly entertaining and, as always with Hollinghurst, the dialogue is immaculate and the characterization first class. . . . Every Alan Hollinghurst novel is a cause for celebration, and this spacious, elegant satire is no exception
Fabulously involving and rich. It’s also very funny . . . An extraordinary achievement
Elegant . . . affecting, erudite [and written] with tenderness and sensuous immediacy
Delightful . . . Tremendously readable and engrossing
Perfect . . . Elegant people partying on the edge of the abyss
Intricate, witty, playful . . . Comedy of manners, investigation of class, changing political and social landscape—all the reliable pleasures that Hollinghurst’s fiction offers are here
Ambitious, epic and satisfying
All stars
Most relevant
Excellent narration of this spanning epic novel. Plucks at my heart, the delving into male love of the Edwardians. It sailed by me easily as I got on with my life. Tears and smiles.

Another fabulous novel from the Master

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The narrator is very gifted and talented. I hear he has also just finished recording The Line of Beauty which I shall look out for. The novel itself is excellent. Hollinghurst is so good at penetrating the minds of his characters

Superb narration

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Sorry I found this book overly long rambling and convoluted. There was never one character to identify with such as in Our Evenings which I loved. There was way too much extraneous detail which at times provided good historical context but often didn’t seem necessary.

Too long!

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... it would be "life goes on". Excellent narration. It IS a long book but very good. I would have enjoyed reading it but chose to listen instead.

If I had to sum up the message of this novel

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