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.
Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books There was the soft glare of the flash – twice – three times – a gleaming sense of occasion, the gleam floating in the eye as a blot of shadow, his heart running fast with no particular need of courage as he grinned and said, ‘Prime Minister, would you like to dance?’ 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 with peerless style a young man’s collision with his own desires, and with a world he can never truly belong to. 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. Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.
