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    An Awfully Big Adventure: A Novel
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    An Awfully Big Adventure: A Novel
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    An Awfully Big Adventure: A Novel
    Ebook204 pages2 hours

    An Awfully Big Adventure: A Novel

    By Beryl Bainbridge

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In postwar Liverpool, a teenager joins a theater troupe to escape her working-class life—and is drawn into a darker world.

    From one of Britain’s best-loved novelists, this is the story of Stella Bradshaw, an orphaned sixteen-year-old with dreams of getting out of her boardinghouse in the slums. Unwilling to resign herself to a job at Woolworth’s, she finds a place at the Liverpool Repertory Company instead.
     
    She quickly falls head over heels for the rundown theater’s dissolute director, Meredith Potter, but he has no interest in her. And Stella is too naïve to understand why. As she tries to gain experience with other colleagues in the hope of one day seducing Meredith, the director is faced with a crisis when a cast member is injured just as the company’s production of Peter Pan is about to open. The replacement is an older man, a war hero and a prominent actor—and he’s instantly drawn to Stella. But while the romance that follows may be innocent, its implications are far from wholesome.
     
    Named by the Times (London) as one of the “fifty greatest British writers since 1945,” author Beryl Bainbridge portrays working-class England in the aftermath of World War II with her signature dark humor and dry wit. Adapted into a 1995 film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, An Awfully Big Adventure is an atmospheric historical novel about the loss of innocence with a definitively modern—and chilling—twist.

    This ebook features an illustrated biography of Beryl Bainbridge including rare images from the author’s estate.

     
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9781504039413
    Unavailable
    An Awfully Big Adventure: A Novel
    Author

    Beryl Bainbridge

    Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1932–2010) is acknowledged as one of the greatest British novelists of her time. She was the author of two travel books, five plays, and seventeen novels, five of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, including Master Georgie, which went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award. She was also awarded the Whitbread Literary Award twice, for Injury Time and Every Man for Himself. In 2011, a special Man Booker “Best of Beryl” Prize was awarded in her honor, voted for by members of the public.   Born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby, Bainbridge spent her early years working as an actress, leaving the theater to have her first child. Her first novel, Harriet Said . . ., was written around this time, although it was rejected by several publishers who found it “indecent.” Her first published works were Another Part of the Wood and An Awfully Big Adventure, and many of her early novels retell her Liverpudlian childhood. A number of her books have been adapted for the screen, most notably An Awfully Big Adventure, which is set in provincial theater and was made into a film by Mike Newell, starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant. She later turned to more historical themes, such as the Scott Expedition in The Birthday Boys, a retelling of the Titanic story in Every Man for Himself, and Master Georgie, which follows Liverpudlians during the Crimean War. Her no-word-wasted style and tight plotting have won her critical acclaim and a committed following. Bainbridge regularly contributed articles and reviews to the Guardian, Observer, and Spectator, among others, and she was the Oldie’s longstanding theater critic. In 2008, she appeared at number twenty-six in a list of the fifty most important novelists since 1945 compiled by the Times (London). At the time of her death, Bainbridge was working on a new novel, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress, which was published posthumously.  

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    Reviews for An Awfully Big Adventure

    3.5/5

    96 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Quite a twist in the tail. Being from the 'pool I knew all the locations in this excellent novel.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful moving story - funny, sad, beautiful.
    • 3/5
      Having heard much about Beryl Bainbridge after her passing the previous year (2010), I looked for some of her work.
      Set in 50's, so took some work to feel part of that time. Easy to read, but complex themes and undercurrents. I can see why she has gotten such acclaim as one of best authors. As I read it seemed to call out for a movie version - which I discovered was done in 1995 - with Hugh Grant and few other now-known names.
      An ending that I did NOT anticipate. Glad I didn't read ahead as I often do.
      Now I'll have to find the movie.
      Read in 2011
    • 4/5
      The curious thing abiut this book is that i found the movie more engaging than the text, as if the text were a play script almost. Did anyone else share my expereince? Trully wonderful movie.
    • 4/5
      I haven't seen the movie but can see how it would have rounded out the author's lean prose style. But I still found this book very well written and enjoyable to read. The sense of postwar England, how the book's characters reveal themselves in only brief sentences, the feeling of the plays being staged...
    • 4/5
      The Liverpool novelist Beryl Bainbridge is of course chiefly famous for always being on the Booker shortlist without ever winning (the judges posthumously gave her a special award in recognition of this): this is one of her many near misses (it lost out to [Possession] in 1990), a backstage coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl working as an ASM in a Liverpool rep theatre shortly after the end of the Second World War. As the title implies, the climax of the story comes during a production of Peter Pan, but there's also a strong hint of J.B. Priestley about the novel. That's probably inevitable if you're writing about English provincial theatres in those years, but it's also made explicit by a production of Dangerous Corner earlier in the book. I enjoyed it, as much for the very believable backstage detail as for the story, but it does have its weaknesses. I found the two big reveals in the ending rather too predictable, and Stella a little bit too closed-up and immature to be an interesting character. Byatt probably deserved to win, but that doesn't mean it's not worth bothering with this.
    • 3/5
      I expected to like this more than I did. Stella annoyed me too much for me to really enjoy the novel.
    • 5/5
      I've never read a book by Beryl Bainbridge that I did not absolutely love. This one is no exception. Don't let its slimness fool you...it is a very deep and complicated novel, yet told in Bainbridge's simplistic, non-overburdening prose. Set in Liverpool in 1950, the main character of the novel is Stella Bradshaw, a young, teenaged girl who lives with her Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily in the Aber Hotel, a kind of run down place in a simple Protestant neighborhood. Stella's teachers convinced her uncle that she would not do well in school; she decides to become an actress. She gets her big "break" as a "student" (the equivalent of today's gofer) for a repertory company, and even gets a small role as Ptolemy in a production of Cleopatra. She falls hard for the producer, Meredith Potter, but doesn't know that he prefers the company of men. It is after the main actor of the company has an accident & breaks his leg during the rehearsals for the production of Peter Pan that she meets O'Hara, the actor taking the hurt player's place, that she makes a plan to make Potter jealous, thinking he has spurned her. What happens then leads to tragedy; I won't go on because I hate spoilers!Bainbridge sets the main action to occur within the context of the rep's company production of Peter Pan. How appropriate, when we are looking at a story about the complications of being a child thrust into an adult world too quickly and in many ways, a story about Stella's loss of childhood. Her writing is superb...very sparse, really not too heavy on explaining every little thing for the reader. It is another example of a book in which the reader cannot sit passively and let the author do all the work. The story is concise and taut...very well written.I recommend this book very highly. You might also wish to check out the movie...it was superb. I don't often like movies based on books because too often the writing suffers, but Bainbridge worked on the movie script and much of the integrity of the novel remains.
    • 5/5
      Another little gem from the 1990 Booker shortlist. Beryl Bainbridge was a perennial Booker bridesmaid - she never won the prize, but was shortlisted five times and also longlisted once. This is my first experience of her writing, and it left me wanting to read more.This is a black comedy set in a provincial theatre in Liverpool shortly after the Second World War. The heroine Stella is a young woman living with her aunt and uncle in humble circumstances, whose love of make believe has persuaded them that she should try her luck in the theatre, where she finds a job as a lowly assistant stage manager, which makes her a dogsbody at the service of the array of wonderful theatrical caricatures that inhabit the place. Stella is an almost fearless innocent, who manages to misconstrue almost everything, as the cast and management of the theatre manipulate each other ruthlessly. Darker elements are never very far from the surface, and the ending is cleverly constructed and genuinely surprising. Bainbridge has an eye for telling detail and is often very funny, making this a very entertaining read.
    • 5/5
      Romance among the members of a small theater company. Young girl thinks she’s more sophisticated than she is.
    • 3/5
      Set in the 1950’s this is the story of Stella as she becomes part of a theatre group She lives with her aunt and uncle in a boarding house, and throughout the book there are hints about her disreputable mother, but until the end we never really discover what happened her.I found this a strange book to get stuck into. The characters are distant, and Stella herself is, well weird. The story itself is told in well-crafted sentences, but they are brief, and despite the flickers of humour I never really enjoyed it until the very end.And it is the ending that made me want to reread the book, but I’ll wait a while yet, because I am sure there were quite a few subtle hints that I never picked up on because of my lack of attention and interest.