This story is set in the summer of 1983, where young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens'. Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford, but in his London life, it will be the troubled Catherine who becomes his friend and his uneasy responsibility. At the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.

Accolades

Winner of Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2004.

Reviews

'Luminous ...[an] astonishingly Jamesian novel, a crafty, glittering, sidelong bid by a contemporary master of English prose to be considered heir to James himself. For a novel that spans only four years, 1983 to 1987, it seems to encompass a world as capacious as any in a James novel' - "The Times".

'There is something memorable on every page...there is much to savour in "The Line of Beauty", not least its humour, a shivering yet morally exacting satire that leaves no character untouched' - "Times Literary Supplement".

'Superb...Alan Hollinghurst is in the prime of his writing life, and the immaculate rolling cadences of his new novel are right now the keenest pleasure English prose has to offer' - "Daily Telegraph".

'Quite simply a joy to read. It is solid and traditional, beautifully crafted. A quiet masterpiece' - "Scotland on Sunday."

"The Line of Beauty starts at the time when The Swimming-Pool Library finished; it is 1983, and Margaret Thatcher is re-elected in a landslide victory for the Tories. Twenty-year old Nicholas Guest is living as a lodger with the family of his university friend, Toby, whose father is an ambitious Tory MP. On the edge of the in-crowd, it is a dizzying time in Nick's life, as he gets to rub shoulders with the rich and influential, and, more significantly, more than just shoulders with Leo, his first homosexual lover. The writing is impeccable, with deft, revealing turns of phrase, as optimism turns to scandal and tragedy: boom moves inexorably towards bust, and graphic homosexual encounters and a culture of drugs and fast living become increasingly desperate in the shadow of Aids. Sometimes explicit, full of humour and pathos, this is a fine read." (Kirkus UK)

"Britisher Hollinghurst (The Spell, 1998, etc.) isn't shy: At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else. It's 1983, and narrator Nick Guest, age 20, is literally a guest in the household of Conservative MP Gerald Fedden, whose son, Toby, Nick befriended at Oxford. Given an attic room and loosely assigned the task of looking after the Feddens' unstable manic-depressive daughter Catherine, Nick is given entree into a world of drunken, drug-laced parties at ancestral manors, high-stakes financial transactions, and politicians all obsessed with catching a glimpse of "The Lady"-Thatcher herself (who finally does make a cameo-hilariously-toward the end). Nick pursues his studies in James (though they may seem overkill in a novel already so saturated in the Jamesian) and his search for love-with a young Jamaican office worker, then with a closeted and cokehead Lebanese millionaire-though, as becomes clear, both his scholarship and sexuality are painfully peripheral in the world he's chosen to inhabit. Oddly, Nick is less interesting as a character than as an observer: His youthful affairs do gain gravitas as the '80s progress under the specter of AIDS, but over the story's course he goes from a virginal 20-year-old to a wizened 24-year-old. More fascinating are Hollinghurst's incisive depictions of the brilliance and ease that insulate and animate the Feddens-especially the witty and difficult Gerald and the spectacular mess that is Catherine.-and the crushing realization that Nick, unlike those around him, does not have the casual luxury to crash up his own life and survive. A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core." (Kirkus Reviews US)

Author Biography

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star and The Spell. He had received the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for FIction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. He lives in London.