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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 to initiate her in the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O’Hara, their 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 Katutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author’s very best—and best-loved—novels.
“Wickedly diverting . . . Poignant, arresting and often funny, an accumulation of such small, telling details effectively recreates the atmosphere of Liverpool in the mid-’50s: a gritty, exhausted city pocked by bomb damage, only just beginning to emerge from the anguish of the war . . . Succinct and tart, An Awfully Big Adventure never takes itself too seriously, the ironic intent underlined by a title suggesting a bedtime story for grown-ups. Gleefully exploiting the limits of her material, Bainbridge manages, against all the odds, to recycle stock characters and situations into a sophisticated entertainment.”
—Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times
“A formidably clever novelist.”
—The Observer
“She is a nice, unpretentious sort of writer with a boozy, have-a-go attitude.”
—Richard Ingrams
“Her genius lies in that territory which she has made entirely her own, in the comic evocation of the flat and mundane life against which her characters are in perpetual and ineffectual revolt.”
—Peter Ackroyd, The Sunday Times
“An air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice lingers around the margins of her fiction . . . The prose in these books is dry, pointed and idiomatic; Ms. Bainbridge possesses a peculiarly acute ear for the desultory chatter of people who have given up expecting very much out of life . . . A former actress herself, Ms. Bainbridge chronicles the backstage antics of her fictional theater company with knowing aplomb. She captures its air of shabby amateurism with a couple of flicks of the wrist, conjures up its petty in-fighting with a few bright lines of dialogue.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review
“A Booker Prize nominee, Bainbridge’s latest novel is a compelling read, again demonstrating her acuity of observation and darkly comic view of life. In Stella Bradshaw, a teenage aspiring actress from the slums of Liverpool, Bainbridge limns a tough but beguiling character . . . Her portrait of a seedy repertory troupe, whose members histrionically indulge in love affairs and unrequited passions, is classic . . . Bainbridge’s prose brims with pithy insights tinged with sardonic humor, and her plot moves swiftly to a chilling conclusion.”
“Imagine Priestley’s The Good Companions as written by Gogol and you will have some idea of the mixture of waggish humour and sordid pathos in Bainbridge’s novel . . . Bainbridge has the theatre in her bones . . . Her disconcerting humour, her ability to establish character in the flick of a sentence, her clarity of style are all confidently employed in this impressive novel, as well as the poignant appraisal of the not-very-distant past that is perhaps her own mournful trademark and gives her a unique place among British novelists.”
—Penny Perrick, The Sunday Times
“This is one of Bainbridge’s best books. The close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction.”
—The Times
“A subtle schizophrenic insight into adult relationships . . . Bainbridge’s understated prose and obsessive eye for the smallest and most telling of details have never been better employed.”
—Time Out
“Vintage bittersweet Bainbridge.”
—The Mail on Sunday
“Beryl Bainbridge’s writing makes everyone else’s prose look flabby.”
—Susannah Clapp, London Review of Books
“She has an extraordinary knack of button-holing you from the start and never letting go.”
—Martyn Groff, The Daily Telegraph
© Brendan King
Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934–2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress – an experience she drew on later when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, which was made into a 1995 film, directed by Mike Newell, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which garnered her the nickname “the Booker Bridesmaid”; in 2011, a special Man Booker ‘Best-of Beryl’ Prize was awarded in her honor. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London’s Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.
© Hannah Yoon
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.
An Awfully Big Adventure
ISBN: 9781961341920 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 50
Spring 2026 • Pub: Mar 10, 2026
$19 • Paperback with flaps • 5” x 8.5” • 208 pages
Fiction—20th century British / Black Humor / Theater
Rights: US, Audio
eBook ISBN: 9781961341937
