Ratings6
Average rating3.8
From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: 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 schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families’ lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them. Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism—The Stranger’s Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
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I get why this is considered good, but man did I struggle, even with the audiobook. I'd tried reading this a couple times before and just couldn't get into it; having made it through the audiobook, I get why I couldn't. It sounds like such a good story, but it's just executed so dryly and, at times, confusingly. There's a kernel of a good story/book here, but this just isn't it. The overall premise of the war-time poet, killed in action, possibly gay (it's clear in the first section, but it's left unknown for the people in following sections trying to figure things out), and the poem he left in an autograph book, starts well, if a little slow. Then each section jumps about 10-20 years, and you're left trying to figure out who's who and why we're following them. We follow the owner of the autograph book, a young man that wants to write about the poet, and then, I'm not exactly sure the point of the person we follow in the last section other than that he's interested in these people too. Like I said, there are bits of a good story here, I just wish it was told better.