An Awfully Big Adventure

Synopsis

It is 1950 and the Liverpool repertory theatre company is rehearsing its Christmas production of Peter Pan, a story of childhood innocence and loss. Stella has been taken on as assistant stage manager and quickly becomes obsessed with Meredith, the dissolute director. But it is only when the celebrated O’Hara arrives to take the lead that a different drama unfolds. In it, he and Stella are bound together in a past that either dates to interpret.

Author Biography

Dame Beryl Bainbridge was born in Lancashire in November 1934. She worked as an actress at Liverpool Repertory Theatre. She was awarded a DBE in 2000. She wrote her first novel, Harriet Said, during the 1950s, although it was not published until 1972.  She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times; The Dressmaker (1973); The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize; An Awfully Big Adventure (1990) which was made into a film in 1995; Every Man For Himself (1996) which won the Whitbread Novel Award; and Master Georgie (1998) which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).

Beryl Bainbridge died in London in 2010.