A review by carolynf
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

2.0

I only made it about halfway through, and that took real effort. Part of the problem is that nothing much happened in it. The main theme seemed to be how people dealt with homosexuality at various periods from the 1910s to the modern day. But the book jumped from period to period with too many changes in cast. I guess it is supposed to be suspenseful, trying to figure out how the new characters being introduced will connect up to the ones introduced at the beginning. But I just found it irritating. Daphne is introduced in the first section of the book and reappears the most often in later parts. Because one of the characters introduced in the first part is a poet, another theme is how writers are interpreted by society after their death, which I also did not find particularly interesting.