A "dark and brilliant" story of the secrets, sex, and violence playing out behind the scenes of a repertory theater troupe in postwar Liverpool: "Never before has showbusiness been revealed as less romantic." (Patrick Skene Catling, The Sunday Telegraph)

Liverpool, 1950. Against the grimy backdrop of the gray postwar city, a shabby, scandal-steeped repertory theater company rehearses for their Christmas performance of Peter Pan. Treading the boards for the first time is sixteen-year-old Stella Bradshaw, ambitious, idealistic, and still overwhelmingly innocent. She falls hard for the rakish, monocled director, Meredith Potter, but, unable to attract his attentions-and not understanding why he's spending quite so much time with their male colleagues-she turns to another to initiate her in the ways of love. Enter the celebrated P. L. O'Hara, their dashing leading man who's nursing secrets of his own. When the curtain is up, fantastical entertainment abounds, but backstage a very different drama is playing out: a pitch-black comedy of indiscretion, intrigue, and eventual tragedy.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and dusted with that magical "air of Pinteresque menace and Sparkian malice [that] lingers around the margins of [all of Beryl Bainbridge's] fiction," (Michiko Katutani, The New York Times Book Review), An Awfully Big Adventure is one of the author's very best-and best-loved-novels.

Dame Beryl Bainbridge (1934-2010) was born in Liverpool, where she began her adult life working as an actress - an experience she drew on later when writing An Awfully Big Adventure, which was made into a 1995 film, directed by Mike Newell, starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. Five of her seventeen novels were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and in 2011, a special Man Booker 'Best-of Beryl' Prize was awarded in her honor. Master Georgie (1998) won the James Tait Memorial Prize, and both Injury Time (1977) and Every Man for Himself (1996) were awarded the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. Also a talented painter, she lived for many years in a house crammed with eccentric Victoriania in London's Camden Town, where visitors were forced to squeeze past the stuffed buffalo in her entrance hall.