The Stranger's Child Audiobook

Quotes

• “Masterful…Few novels so skillfully revealed what’s really said behind polite facades, and The Stranger’s Child displays that talent on a broader canvas…The brilliance of The Stranger’s Child is in how it reveals the ways bad blood and secrets muck with history. When everybody strains to say the appropriate thing, the facts suffer. That theme is perfectly suited for Hollinghurst, who can reveal a host of hidden messages in the simplest utterance (or pursed lips)…Psychologically penetrating…Brilliant.”

  — Minneapolis Star Tribune

• “Perfect…Hollinghurst writes so carefully and subversively, often with one eyebrow raised in sardonic amusement as he satirizes the excesses of his mostly high-born protagonists.”

  — Financial Times

• “Erudite, stylish, very amusing…There is a poignancy and a humor that is far from conventional, and a sense of an ending that outlasts the comforts of closure.”

  — Bookforum

• “Magnificent…insightful. Hollinghurst explores how a living, breathing existence can become a biographical subject riddled with omissions and distortions…Hollinghurst divides the novel into five novella-length sections, in each of [which] he demonstrates his knack for conjuring the moments between events, the seeming down time in which the ramifications of turning points in life sort themselves out. His immersion in each period is fluid and free of false notes, collectively fusing into a single symphonic epic…[A] beautifully written, brilliantly observed, and masterfully orchestrated novel.”

  — Seattle Times

• “With the prewar ambiance of Atonement, the manor-house mystique of Gosford Park, and the palpable sexual tension of Hollinghurst’s own The Line of Beauty, this generously paced, thoroughly satisfying novel will gladden the hearts of Anglophile readers.”

  — Library Journal

• “Delightful…In Hollinghurst’s eagerly awaited new novel we see that if history is written by the winners, biography belongs to the survivors…Tremendously readable and engrossing.”

  — Daily Mail (London)

• “At once classically literary and delightfully, subversively modern…The Stranger’s Child is easily [Hollinghurst’s] most subtle and most ambitious novel. Hollinghurst is a master observer of human and social behavior. As told in five sections spanning nearly a century, The Stranger's Child uses the mode to startling, marvelous effect, as his characters grow old and perish while the fractured, uncertain memories of each remain—for future inhabitants to debate and unearth.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “Lives tangle and untangle in a literate, literary mystery at the heart of World War I by Man Booker Prize winner Hollinghurst…How do we know the truth about anyone’s life? [This] carefully written, philosophically charged novel invites us to consider that question.”

  — Kirkus Reviews

• “[Hollinghurst] writes like Henry James, but without the obfuscation; his gorgeous sentences home in on the delicate nuances of human relationships but don’t sacrifice the larger social canvas along the way.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “Daring…Hollinghurst’s fine new book, The Stranger’s Child—the closest thing he has written to an old-fashioned chronicle novel—contains a whole hidden literary curriculum, out of which he has fashioned something fresh and vital.”

  — New York Times Book Review