The Line of Beauty

Description

Starting at the moment The Swimming-Pool Library ended, The Line of Beauty traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, it is a major work by one of the finest writers in the English language.In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolised at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions.As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with.Celebrating 40 years of outstanding international writing, this is one of the essential Picador novels reissued in a beautiful new series style.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty and The Stranger's Child. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.

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 *