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The Stranger�s Child is Alan Hollinghurst�s masterpiece, the book that cements his position as one of the finest novelists of our time. In its scope, intelligence and elegance. Sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle is reading Tennyson in a hammock in the garden of Two Acres, the family home in suburban London. Her brother George arrives to visit with his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a handsome, assured and sometimes outrageous young man with a burgeoning reputation as a poet. After a tantalizing and dramatic weekend Cecil writes a long poem in Daphne�s autograph album as a parting gift. It is titled �Two Acres,� and both Daphne and George (whose feelings for Cecil also go well beyond mere friendship) immediately see how important the poem is � but none of them can foresee the complex and lasting effects it will have on all their lives. When the next section of the novel begins, everything has changed: Daphne is married to Cecil�s brother Dudley Valance; George to a historian named Madeleine; and Cecil is dead, killed by a sniper in World War One. A Cabinet officer and man of letters named Sebastian Stokes is compiling an edition of Cecil�s poems. He is especially curious about Cecil�s personal (and passionate) letters and unpublished poems, papers that seem to have gone missing. The book leaps forward to a party to celebrate Daphne�s seventieth birthday. We meet Peter Rowe, a music teacher, and his boyfriend, Paul Bryant, a bank employee with a feeling for Cecil�s poetry. Soon Paul is taking up an idea that Peter abandoned: to write a biography of Cecil Valance. It means making some startling discoveries about a past that the Valance family would prefer to keep in sepia and shadows. The Stranger�s Child is that rare thing, a historical novel whose characters, in their passions and betrayals, constantly surprise the reader, and will surely be read for generations to come.