PW's review of Beryl Bainbridge’s out-of-print novel An Awfully Big Adventure, first published in the U.S. by HarperCollins in 1991, proceeds in bits that are still blurb-able more than 30 years later.
Her prose, we wrote, brimmed “with pithy insights tinged with sardonic humor,” while her precocious adolescent protagonist Stella was the “Typhoid Mary of psychological injury; one after another, members of the troupe suffer from her impetuous behavior.”
Now, McNally Editions is betting that the late English author’s true crime–tinged book can succeed on modern-day shelves.
Beginning with its chic reissue of An Awfully Big Adventure, set for March 10 with a new foreword by Yiyun Li, McNally will bring Bainbridge’s novels—relatively unknown in the U.S. prior to her death in 2010—to American readers over the next several years.
“There is no one like her,” McNally Editions editor Lucy Scholes said of Bainbridge. “She writes these short, snappy books that are very macabre. She's witty and comic, but they’re shot through with tragedy—people often die in her books quite suddenly and shockingly.”
An Awfully Big Adventure will be the 50th release by McNally Editions, the publishing arm of New York City bookseller McNally Jackson. The publisher is known for repackaging out-of-print gems for a younger audience—and Bainbridge’s work naturally lends itself to this task, according to Scholes.
“She's not for the faint of heart, but I feel like there’s a sort of climate in her books that readers are much more prepared for now, that maybe they just weren't first time round,” Scholes said.
McNally will follow up An Awfully Big Adventure with two more of Bainbridge’s 17 novels, According to Queeney and Young Adolf, set to publish over the next two years.
Across the pond, the U.K.’s Daunt Books will co-publish An Awfully Big Adventure as the kickoff to its own, more extensive, program devoted to the author. Bainbridge was more popular in her home country and was nominated for the Booker Prize five times, earning her the bittersweet nickname the “Booker Bridesmaid.”
Bainbridge’s grandson and filmmaker Charlie Russell hopes the McNally program will bring her legacy to new shores.
“She just wrote what she felt, and I think that's really refreshing, particularly in a world where things can be so mediated and people are trying to pre-guess their audience or what sells,” Russell said.
He added that his grandmother’s personal mythology was intimately intertwined with her fiction, which she wrote almost compulsively. Bainbridge characterized her own childhood as “troubled” due to a “fraught home life,” Russell said, which comes through in her candid writing of young girls like Stella.
In Brendan King’s research for his 2016 biography of Bainbridge, Russell said that certain stories about their family matriarch were debunked, while other unbelievable tales were confirmed. Many revolved around her "hundreds of love affairs,” in Russell’s words, including a romance with her married publisher, whose wife was Bainbridge’s editor.
Russell added that reissuing Bainbridge’s stories—which were, if not always truthful in the factual sense, intensely authentic—is a way of keeping her spirit alive.
“The whole family revolved around her, and I think when she went, we all didn't really know what to do with that anymore,” he said. ”It’s taken us quite a while to realize there's a real tragedy here if we don't keep shouting about her.”
