An Awfully Big Adventure represents three firsts for me – it is the first Beryl Bainbridge novel I have read; this is the first deliberately spoiler-free review I have written; and never before have I finished a novel and immediately gone back to the beginning and started again. I suspect from the way the novel is so cleverly constructed Bainbridge may have intended this to happen. What I do know is that it is wonderful, even with the one big issue which I have with the novel, which I will come to in a minute.