An 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.