The Line of Beauty

‘As good as the English novel gets. Almost every sentence is a thing of beauty and the book as a whole will prove itself a joy for ever, the definitive reimagining of the decade of Thatcher and AIDS’ -Jonathan Bate, SUNDAY TIMES
It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in 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.
As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in
the Feddens’ world, while also pursuing his own private obsession, with beauty – a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An early affair with a young black council worker gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that brings into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.

“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? Anthony Quinn, Daily TELEGRAPH
‘Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants … It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving. A brilliantly comical and accurate satire upon the high noon of Mrs Thatcher’
Nicola Shulman, Evening STANDARD