An Awfully Big Adventure

A blackly comic story of the secrets, sex, and violence behind the curtain of a repertory theatre's postwar production of Peter Pan: its 'close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction.' (The Times)

Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the grey postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theatre 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 colleague to initiate her into the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O'Hara, a 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 Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author's very best - and best-loved - novels.