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An Awfully Big Adventure
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $19.00
ISBN13: 9781961341920
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: Mar 10 2026
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.40
Language: English
Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice . . . A former actress herself, Ms. Bainbridge chronicles the backstage antics of her fictional theater company with knowing aplomb. --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review
A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theater'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 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 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.
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