The Stranger's Child is the fifth novel by Alan Hollinghurst, first published in June 2011. 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 the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: "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". Plot The Stranger's Child consists of five sections, each set in a different period: Two Acres In 1913 Cecil Valance, the 22-year-old heir to a large country estate and a published poet, spends a weekend at Two Acres, the suburban family home of his younger Cambridge University friend, George Sawle. Cecil makes a deep impression on the Sawle family, not least on George's 16-year-old younger sister Daphne, who develops a crush on him. Unbeknownst to the Sawles, Cecil and George are gay and the two of them spend much of their time together engaging in amorous trysts. On his final night at Two Acres, Cecil drunkenly kisses Daphne. On the following morning she discovers that the autograph book she has asked Cecil to sign contains a freshly written five-page poem, which he has entitled 'Two Acres'. Daphne believes that the poem contains secret references to her kiss with Cecil and is surprised when George is churlish in his reaction to it. Revel In 1926 members of the Sawle and Valance families gather over a weekend at Corley Court, the large country house at the centre of the Valance family estate. They are there to discuss the life and legacy of Cecil – killed during World War I – and to assist a family friend, Sebastian "Sebby" Stokes, who is planning to write an