An Awfully Big Adventure - Softcover

Bainbridge, Beryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1961341921 ISBN 13: 9781961341920

Publisher: McNally Jackson Books, 2026

Synopsis

A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theatre's postwar production of Peter Pan: its 'close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction.' (The Times)

Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the grey postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theatre company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Treading the boards for the first time is sixteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, ambitious, idealistic, and still overwhelmingly innocent. She falls hard for the rakish, monocled director, Meredith Potter, but, unable to attract his attentions and not understanding why he's spending quite so much time with their male colleagues she turns to another colleague to initiate her into the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O'Hara, a dashing leading man who's nursing secrets of his own. When the curtain is up, fantastical entertainment abounds, but backstage a very different drama is playing out: a pitch-black comedy of indiscretion, intrigue, and eventual tragedy.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and dusted with that magical 'air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice [that] lingers around the margins of [all of Beryl Bainbridge's] fiction,' (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author's very best and best-loved novels.

About this title

About the Authors

Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934-2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress an experience she drew on later when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, later made into a 1995 film, directed by Mike Newell, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which garnered her the nickname 'the Booker Bridesmaid'; in 2011, a special Man Booker 'Best-of Beryl' Prize was awarded in her honour. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London's Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction, including most recently Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose, and Where Reasons End, and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Edition details

• Publisher: McNally Jackson Books
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1961341921
• ISBN 13: 9781961341920
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216