The Stranger’s child, by Alan Hollinghurst

With midnight approaching, can’t let Christa down, so here’s the scoop on a couple last titles of 2011. This longish novel draws upon the short life and durable romantic literary persona of Rupert Brooke, the World War I poet who wrote, “If I should die, think only this of me:/ that there’s some corner of a foreign field /That is forever England….” Like Brooke, the central figure, Cecil Valance, dies in the Great War and he leaves behind a iconic poem scribbled in the autograph book of his friend and lover, George Sawle’s, sister Daphne. Daphne, too, falls in love with the dashing, captivating, and somewhat amoral Cecil. When a modern-day biographer of Valance begins digging into the past, long buried secrets are revealed. The plot of the novel is engaging; the language beautiful; but it is also a sweeping history of gay life, particularly in England, over the past one hundred years. 435 pp.