LoveReading Says
A Booker winner which was first published in 2005, it tells of Nick Guest’s life as a lodger with a privileged tory London family of which Nick was at Oxford with the son. Set in the 80s it is social satire, class obsessed stuff with a difference. It is very gay, Nick coming under the influence of a disreputable playboy, and very funny as well as being astute and naturally beautifully written. A book to savour, not to hurry, but to indulge in as Nick does himself. Slow and ponderous, it covers such topics as love and friendship, rejection, adultery, the pursuit of power and the start of AIDS. A challenging read and a great book.
Sarah Broadhurst
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The Line of Beauty Synopsis
One of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Winner of the Man Booker Prize, The Line of Beauty is a classic novel about class, politics and sexuality in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s Britain.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious Tory MP, his wife Rachel and their children Toby and Catherine.
Innocent of politics and money, Nick is swept up into the Feddens' world and an era of endless possibility, all the while pursuing his own private obsession with beauty.
The Line of Beauty is Alan Hollinghurst's Man Booker Prize-winning masterpiece. It is a novel that defines a decade, exploring a young man's collision with his own desires, and with a world he can never truly belong to.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
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About Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud in Gloucestershire, England in 1954 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. Between 1982 and 1995 he was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement.
His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), gives a vivid account of gay life in London during the early 1980s. It was followed by The Folding Star (1994), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). In 1998 he published Spell, a gay comedy of manners.
Hollinghurst's credits include the translation of Jean Racine's 17th century play, Bajazet, which was first performed in 1990.
The Line of Beauty, published in 2004, describes four years of change and tragedy in 1980s Britain; it won the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
Hollinghurst lives in London.
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