The Line of Beauty

Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the NBCC award. From Alan Hollinghurst, the acclaimed author of The Sparsholt Affair, The Line of Beauty is a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 10/01/2005
ISBN: 9781582346106
Pages: 438
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.42h x 5.47w x 1.17d

Review Citations: Ingram Advance 10/01/2005 pg. 88 - Best Of The Best/Highly Recommended
New York Times 10/16/2005 pg. 28
Kirkus Best Books 03/01/2006 pg. 2
Newsweek 07/13/2009 pg. 48
New Yorker (The) 10/17/2011 pg. 86