Additional information
by Beryl Bainbridge (Author), Yiyun Li (Foreword by)
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.
Author Biography
Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction, including most recently Wednesday's Child, The Book of Goose, and Where Reasons End, and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
