Plain English: August 2011 Archives

Alan  Hollinghurst is on the 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist for The Stranger's Child, having - deservedly - won some years ago for The Line of Beauty. The Stranger's Child involves a Rupert Brooke-like poet, essentially gay, who might have fathered a child in this complex plot, which takes in several generations. I'm now trying to read the entire longlist, in preparation for my annual Man Booker feature in the Wall Street Journal Europe, and do not have anything yet to say about the merits of this novel, except that I have seldom enjoyed any work so much as reading it.