In the final event of our 2011 series with the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, we were delighted to welcome Alan Hollinghurst to read from and talk about his new novel The Stranger’s Child. Acclaimed by critics and longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the book extends Hollinghurst’s imaginative engagement with English gay experience and its complicated connections to class, society and politics. Covering the development and decline of relationships between characters across the twentieth century, the novel begins with a semi-aristocratic poet, Cecil Valance, visiting the home of his Cambridge friend and lover George Sawle. Here is Alan Hollinghurst reading from the opening section, in which in an after-dinner encounter Cecil attempts to discover if George’s naive younger sister Daphne has spotted he and George cavorting in the bushes earlier that day.

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