The Stranger's Child

The Stranger's Child

First edition
Author	Alan Hollinghurst
Language	English
Genre	Fiction, Historical fiction, LGBT literature
Set in	1913 England Italy
Publisher	Picador
Publication date	2011
Media type	Print and digital
ISBN	9780330483247

The Stranger's Child is the fifth novel by Alan Hollinghurst, first published in June 2011. The book tells the story of a minor poet, Cecil Valance, who is killed in the First World War. In 1913, he visits a Cambridge friend, George Sawle, at the latter's home in Stanmore, Middlesex. While there Valance writes a poem entitled "Two Acres", about the Sawles' house and addressed, ambiguously, either to George himself or to George's younger sister, Daphne. The poem goes on to become famous and the novel follows the changing reputation of Valance and his poetry in the following decades.

The phrase "the stranger's child" comes from the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child." In an interview with The Oxonian Review in 2012, Hollinghurst commented of the epigraph that "[t]he music of the words is absolutely wonderful, marvellously sad and consoling all at once. It fitted exactly with an idea I wanted to pursue in the book about the unknowability of the future".^[1]