The Stranger’s Child

Blurb

The Stranger's Child is the fifth novel by Alan Hollinghurst. The book tells the story of a minor poet, Cecil Valance, who is killed in the First World War. In 1913 he visits a Cambridge friend, George Sawle, at the latter's home in Stanmore, Middlesex. While there Valance writes a poem entitled 'Two Acres', about the Sawles' house and addressed, ambiguously, either to George himself or to George's younger sister, Daphne. The poem goes on to become famous and the novel follows the changing reputation of Valance and his poetry in the following decades.
The phrase "the stranger's child" comes from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem In Memoriam A.H.H.: "And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child." In an interview with The Oxonian Review in 2012, Hollinghurst commented of the epigraph that "[t]he music of the words is absolutely wonderful, marvellously sad and consoling all at once. It fitted exactly with an idea I wanted to pursue in the book about the unknowability of the future".