The Stranger's Child

The Stranger's Child

Alan Hollinghurst

Signed

Published by Picador/Tuskar Rock
London, 2011

New

One of a limited edition of 40 copies signed and dated by the author and bound in dark green leather and contained in a light green/beige slipcase. Fine.

Alan Hollinghurst has selected a time frame of a little under 100 years and uses 5 snapshots ( 1913, 1926, 1967, 1980 and 2008) to look at British society. Centre stage is the fictional poet Cecil Valance who was killed in the First World War at the age of 25, but whose aura and legacy haunts the novel. Fittingly the book is dedicated to Alan Hollinghurst's friend Mick Imlah, a gifted poet who died in 2009.

"Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. He offers surely the best example of novelistic ambition squared with the highest aesthetic standards. Where so many fiction writers seem stylish but austere, Hollinghurst has his cake and eats it. His novels cover high life and low life, culture and instinct, jokes and opera, with equal confidence....His best books are beautiful at the level of the sentence and impressive at the levels of character, incident and plot; they manage to be nearly perfect and great fun at the same time...As ever, Hollinghurst's set pieces are stunning.... The Stranger's Child will no doubt be one of the best novels published this year", Theo Tait, The Guardian

"The Stranger’s Child is a remarkable, unmissable achievement, written with the calm authority of an author who could turn his literary gifts to just about anything. As for the mercurial title, readers will find much, but characteristically not all, revealed by the closing stages. One leaves the novel with a sense of the truly extraordinary". Richard canning, The Independent.

"With this book, it becomes clear how unified Hollinghurst's aesthetic has been so far. And aesthetics, always a matter of ideology, point to the fiercely yet subtly political heart of the book: in a daring act appropriation he has interpolated within a history of textual ellipses, lacunae and silences a secret history of homosexuality, of what can and cannot be articulated at different historical junctures. Neel Mukherjee, The Times.

"Masterly in its narrative sweep, richly textured prose and imaginative flair and depth, this novel about an increasingly threadbare literary reputation enormously enhances Hollinghurst’s own. With The Stranger’s Child, an already remarkable talent unfurls into something spectacular", Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times.

£285.00