The Stranger's Child cover art

The Stranger's Child

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The Stranger's Child

By: Alan Hollinghurst
Narrated by: Joe Jameson
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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.

©2011 Alan Hollinghurst (P)2023 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd Family Life Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Fiction

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All stars
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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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... 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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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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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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