The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst

• Stadt-und Universitätsbibliothek Bern, Switzerland
• Knjiznica Otona Zupancica, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Edinburgh City Libraries & Information Services, Scotland
• Mestska Knihovna v Praze / Municipal Library of Prague, Czech Republic
  

Publisher of Nominated Edition
Picador ISBN 033048320X

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest 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 two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolized 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. Two vividly contrasting love affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to him as that of power and riches to his friends.

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.

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. The Line of Beauty won the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995. He lives in London.