The Telegraph has an exclusive extract from Alan Hollingshurst’s The Stranger’s Child. And Hari Kunzru reviews the novel for the Guardian.
‘As an accounting with class and history, Hollinghurst’s novel will inevitably be compared to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It is at its strongest when teasing out nuances of social behaviour: Paul Bryant, the shy bank clerk, is so concerned to behave appropriately with his employer’s family that as he walks home after spending time in their company, “the small muscular contractions of pleasure and politeness remained almost unconsciously on his face”. The fashionable decorator, Mrs Riley, makes Daphne uncomfortable by observing her “in her disappointed and reducing way”.
As should be clear by now, The Stranger’s Child is a profoundly nostalgic book, in the strict Greek sense of “homesickness”: it longs to go home to the prelapsarian past, from whose sensuous immediacy (two lovers in a wood) we have been exiled into the rootless present.
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