Monthly Spotlight: An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly perceptive coming-of-age tale was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990
A darkly comic novel about class, the long shadow of war, and unrequited first love
Liverpool, 1950. Teenage Stella is hired as assistant stage manager by a repertory theatre company and soon falls into a heady infatuation with the director, Meredith – failing to notice how he shows not only no interest in her, but in any woman.
When the celebrated actor O’Hara arrives to take the lead in their production of Peter Pan, it sets in motion a drama offstage of lost innocence, tragedy, and miscommunication.
Peopled by a cast of eccentric characters and the air thick with the scent of greasepaint and cigarettes, Beryl Bainbridge’s evocative and sharp-edged novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990.
An Awfully Big Adventure was first published in 1989 by Duckworth. It is now published in the UK by Daunt Books.
Beryl Bainbridge
About the Author
Beryl Bainbridge, who died in 2010, was a Booker Prize heroine
Other nominated books by Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge’s masterly evocation of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain’s greatest Man of Letters, in all his wit and glory
Beryl Bainbridge explores the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures - and hidden secrets - of her enigmatic central character
Beryl Bainbridge’s fictional history chronicles the fate of the privileged passengers of the Titanic on its doomed maiden voyage
Surprises abound in Beryl Bainbridge’s unsettling comic novel, praised by fellow author Graham Greene as both ‘outrageously funny and horrifying’
The mundane and the macabre collide in Beryl Bainbridge’s darkly comic tale about the shockingly unexpected consequences of a young girl’s heartbreak
