Welcome to Litsy!

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: In postwar Liverpool, a teenager joins a theater troupe to escape her working-class life�and is drawn into a darker world. From one of Britain�s best-loved novelists, this is the story of Stella Bradshaw, an orphaned sixteen-year-old with dreams of getting out of her boardinghouse in the slums. Unwilling to resign herself to a job at Woolworth�s, she finds a place at the Liverpool Repertory Company instead. She quickly falls head over heels for the rundown theater�s dissolute director, Meredith Potter, but he has no interest in her. And Stella is too na�ve to understand why. As she tries to gain experience with other colleagues in the hope of one day seducing Meredith, the director is faced with a crisis when a cast member is injured just as the company�s production of Peter Pan is about to open. The replacement is an older man, a war hero and a prominent actor�and he�s instantly drawn to Stella. But while the romance that follows may be innocent, its implications are far from wholesome. Named by the Times (London) as one of the �fifty greatest British writers since 1945,� author Beryl Bainbridge portrays working-class England in the aftermath of World War II with her signature dark humor and dry wit. Adapted into a 1995 film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, An Awfully Big Adventure is an atmospheric historical novel about the loss of innocence with a definitively modern�and chilling�twist. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Beryl Bainbridge including rare images from the author�s estate.