An Excerpt from ‘An Awfully Big Adventure’ by Beryl Bainbridge, Selected by Lucy Scholes
I can't recall when it was that I first read Beryl Bainbridge. Growing up in the UK, she was always there—on the bookshelves alongside Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Anita Brookner, and any number of other literary grande dames. She was a writer known for her macabre, fearless, hugely entertaining, extremely funny, and deliciously clipped novels. Imagine my surprise then when I learned her name doesn’t quite elicit the same recognition in the US.
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.