The Folding Star

Description

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard 'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard Edward Manners - thirty three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life. Almost at once he falls in love with seventeen-year-old Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of the 1890s Belgian painter Edgard Orst. 'A generous pinch of true wit' Sunday Times

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004.

"'As is typical of the best classics, he has fashioned a universal tale of sexual obsession, love and death out of a particular life'" Marie Claire "'Even in its sexiest moments, it never loses its intellectual poise. Dry witticisms intersperse sweaty couplings...The Folding Star is a novel of considerable breadth.What gives it its depth is the candour, wit, sensuous immediacy and melancholy intelligence applied to it'" -- Peter Kemp Times Literary Supplement "'Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's...[He ] is on as fine a form in this novel as his first'" -- Tom Shone Spectator "'Grand 19th-century fin-de-siecle lusciousness, a seamy 20th-century carnality and a generous pinch of true wit'" Sunday Times