Awfully Big Adventure

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.