The Stranger’s Child is Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel since his 2004 Booker Prize winning The Line of Beauty. Fascinated with class and the ever-changing social and sexual mores of British society, Hollinghurst plunges us into the secrets and shadows of the life of Cecil Valance, a young poet, an aristocrat and a ‘Cambridge man’ in 1913, in the lead-up to World War I. A family dinner at George Sawles’s home (Sawles being Valance’s younger Cambridge friend and lover), sees events play out that will entrance generations to come. After this dinner, Valance writes a poem, ostensibly dedicated to Sawles’s 16-year-old sister Daphne, which becomes a cultural touchstone and sets the world for Hollinghurst’s sharp, funny, deeply observant critique of class, society, sexuality, and the world of literature and literary reputation.

In a homage to Evelyn Waugh – and particularly Brideshead Revisited – Hollinghurst jumps decades to view the events of 1913 again as they have grown in significance, both personally and culturally, with each section taking up the story from a slightly different perspective. The second section takes place in the period between the two World Wars, the third occurs in 1967, the fourth in 1983, and the last in 2008. We meet the people who will write biographies and reassess the value of Valance’s – and their own – contribution to English literature. We also follow the ever-diminishing life of Daphne as her secrets are dissected; her life retold and all but dismissed.

Hollinghurst’s ability to draw out the effects of a seemingly innocuous event down the years, against the ever-changing social order of England, is remarkable. Through class, wealth, the effects of war, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the advent of same-sex marriage, and a critique of how literary myths are created, Hollinghurst paints a broad canvas, that, despite losing some energy towards the end, is beautiful and enthralling.

Pip Newling is a freelance writer and a staffer at Readings Hawthorn.