An Awfully Big Adventure (Paperback)
Language: English
Published by McNally Jackson Books, 2026
- Softcover
- New
Seller: AussieBookSeller, Truganina, VIC, AustraliaAussieBookSeller
AbeBooks seller since June 22, 2007
Condition: New
£ 26.21
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
Paperback. 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. Against the grimy backdrop of the grey postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theatre company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…
Seller Inventory # 9781961341920
- Title
- An Awfully Big Adventure (Paperback)
- Author
- Beryl Bainbridge
- Publisher
- McNally Jackson Books
- Publication year
- 2026
- Condition
- new
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1961341921
- ISBN 13
- 9781961341920
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.
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
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, which was 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, and in 2011, a special Man Booker ‘Best-of Beryl’ Prize was awarded in her honor. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait 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.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
AussieBookSeller
Truganina, VIC, Australia
AbeBooks seller since June 22, 2007
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