A Talent for Living: Yiyun Li on Beryl Bainbridge’s ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’

An Awfully Big Adventure is set in Liverpool around 1950, when the city was still under the long shadow cast by World War II: men and women walk around with visible and invisible scars; material comforts are scarce. Memory is the only possession many characters can claim. And claim it they do, bittersweet or purely bitter, inconvenient at times, often untrustworthy.