The Line of Beauty - by Alan Hollinghurst (Paperback)

About the Book

The first novel focused on gay life to win the Booker Prize, this title does more than glance back at the sometimes frivolous and deadly aspects of London's gay culture. A psychological portrait of the '80s, it confirms stereotypes about class, family, society, politics, and sexuality.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review
International Bestseller

From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

Review Quotes

"A magnificent comedy of manners. Hollinghurst's alertness to the tiniest social and tonal shifts never slackens, and positively luxuriates in a number of unimprovably droll set pieces . . . [an] outstanding novel." --New York Times Book Review

"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the best prose we have today. He brings the eloquence of a George Eliot together with the sexiness and visual acuity of a Nabokov." --Edmund White

"His finest novel to date." --Geoff Dyer

"One can't get enough of Hollinghurst's sentences . . . If you value style, wit, and social satire in your reading, don't miss this elegant and passionate novel." --Washington Post

"Hollinghurst has placed his gay protagonist within a larger social context, and the result is his most tender and powerful novel to date, a sprawling and haunting elegy to the 1980s." --Entertainment Weekly

"Mr. Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror . . . The Line of Beauty is unlikely to be surpassed." --New York Observer

"Almost perfectly written . . . this novel has the air of a classic." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An affecting work of art." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Hollinghurst's prose is a genuine achievement-lavish, poised, sinuously alert . . . The Line of Beauty is an ample and sophisticate delight, charged with hundreds of delicate impressions and insignts, and scores of vital and lovely sentences. It is at once domestic and political, psychological and historical. It is funny, moving, and finally despairing." --New Republic

"Line for line, Hollinghurst's novel about London during the 1980s is the most exquisitely written book I've read in years. Witty observations about politics, society, and family open like little revelations on every page." --Christian Science Monitor

"[A] masterpiece with a skillfully rendered social panorama, a Proustian alertness to social nuance and a stylistic precision that recalls [James]." --Newsday

"A rueful, snapshot-accurate portrait of this era." --Seattle Times

"The Line of Beauty is itself a thing of beauty-an elegant and seductive novel . . . readers will hang on every bracing word. The Line of Beauty may perhaps be the author's most mature and accomplished work to date. It might also be his best." --Philadelphia City Paper

"An intoxicating read . . . each sentence in this book rings as perfect and true as a Schubert sonata." --Hartford Courant

"A deliciously snarky portrait of Thatcherite Britain, but Hollinghurst also makes you believe in his characters, and nobody produced better prose this year." --San Jose Mercury News

About the Author

Alan Hollinghurst is the winner of numerous literary awards, including the Man Booker Price, the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He is the author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Stranger's Child, The Spell, and The Folding Star. The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London.