Awfully Big Adventure, An (Shortlisted For The Booker Prize

Description:
It is 1950 and the Liverpool reporatory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan, a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute director. But it is only when the celebrated O'Hara arrives to take the lead, that a different drama unfolds. In it, he and Stella are bound together in a past that neither dares to interpret.

Review:
*'Vintage bittersweet Bainbridge' MAIL ON SUNDAY *'Imagine Priestley's THE GOOD COMPANIONS as written by Gogol and you will have some idea of the mixture of waggish humour and sordid pathos in Bainbridge's novel' SUNDAY TIMES *'A subtle schizophrenic insight into adult relationships . Bainbridge's understated prose and obsessive eye for the smallest and most telling of details have never been better employed' TIME OUT

Author Biography:
Beryl Bainbridge was born in Lancashire in November 1934. She wrote her first novel, Harriet Said, during the 1950s, although it was not published until 1972.

She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times; The Dressmaker (1973); The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; An Awfully Big Adventure (1990) which was made into a film in 1995; Every Man For Himself (1996) which won the Whitbread Novel Award; and Master Georgie (1998) which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).

Beryl Bainbridge was awarded a DBE in 2000, and later died in London in 2010. A one-off award, the Man Booker Best of Beryl, was created in her honour to celebrate her five shortlisted novels.