An Awfully Big Adventure eBook

A dark and brilliant story of the secrets, sex, and violence playing out behind the scenes of a repertory theater troupe in postwar Liverpool: Never before has showbusiness been revealed as less romantic. (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 ofPeter 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 attentionsand not understanding why hes spendingquite so much time with their male colleaguesshe turns to another to initiate her in the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. OHara, their dashing leading man whos 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 Bainbridges] fiction, (Michiko Katutani,The New York Times Book Review),An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the authors very bestand best-lovednovels.