Awfully Big Adventure

A "e;dark and brilliant"e; story of the secrets, sex, and violence playing out behind the scenes of a repertory theater troupe in postwar Liverpool: "e;Never before has showbusiness been revealed as less romantic."e; (Patrick Skene Catling, The Sunday Telegraph)Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the gray postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theater 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 to initiate her in the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O Hara, their 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 Katutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author s very best and best-loved novels.