The Stranger’s Child

by Alan Hollinghurst
Knopf, 448 pp., $27.95

It really is a shame, these words we tend to hurl at gorgeously written novels. You know – words like “lapidary” and “spellbinding” that reduce the dazzling accretion of detail into a pile of blurbage. There really is no other way to describe The Stranger’s Child, which charts the Byzantine alliances and insults that transform a cadre of relatives around a cheese plate into a bloodcurdling tableau. In five novellalike sections, Hollinghurst relates the fallout of a love triangle between libertine poet Cecil Valance and the siblings George and Daphne, which reach beyond their family peccadilloes into the present.

Saturday, Oct. 22, 3:30-4:15pm, Capitol Extension Rm. E2.036

This article appears in October 21 • 2011.

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