Alan Hollinghurst

Line of Beauty

The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.

The Swimming-Pool Library

Our Evenings

The stranger's child

The Sparsholt Affair

William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat, moves through underground bars, bath houses, and cinemas, and into the world of old Africa hand, Lord Nantwitch, a world of older traditions and hidden allegiances

The Swimming Pool Library

The Stranger’s Child is Alan Hollinghurst’s masterpiece, the book that cements his position as one of the finest novelists of our time. In its scope, intelligence and elegance. Sixteen-year-old Daphne Sawle is reading Tennyson in a hammock in the garden of Two Acres, the family home in suburban London. Her brother George arrives to visit with his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a handsome, assured and sometimes outrageous young man with a burgeoning reputation as a poet. After a tantalizing and dramatic weekend Cecil writes a long poem in Daphne’s autograph album as a parting gift. It is titled “Two Acres,” and both Daphne and George (whose feelings for Cecil also go well beyond mere friendship) immediately see how important the poem is – but none of them can foresee the complex and lasting effects it will have on all their lives. When the next section of the novel begins, everything has changed: Daphne is married to Cecil’s brother Dudley Valance; George to a historian named Madeleine; and Cecil is dead, killed by a sniper in World War One. A Cabinet officer and man of letters named Sebastian Stokes is compiling an edition of Cecil’s poems. He is especially curious about Cecil’s personal (and passionate) letters and unpublished poems, papers that seem to have gone missing. The book leaps forward to a party to celebrate Daphne’s seventieth birthday. We meet Peter Rowe, a music teacher, and his boyfriend, Paul Bryant, a bank employee with a feeling for Cecil’s poetry. Soon Paul is taking up an idea that Peter abandoned: to write a biography of Cecil Valance. It means making some startling discoveries about a past that the Valance family would prefer to keep in sepia and shadows. The Stranger’s Child is that rare thing, a historical novel whose characters, in their passions and betrayals, constantly surprise the reader, and will surely be read for generations to come.

The Stranger's Child

Donald Mitchell

These lectures were notable for their first-ever access to Britten's private diaries, which he kept on a daily basis in the thirties, and a revealing portrait emerges of the two men's relationship, of their work together in many different fields, and the politics of the day and their appalled response to the rise of Fascism in Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

The Year 1936 : the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures Delivered at the University of Kent at Canterbury in November 1979

Britten and Auden in the Thirties

In 1940, the handsome, athletic, and charismatic David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford University to study engineering, unaware of his effect on others—especially on Evert Dax, the lonely son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer himself. Spanning three generations, The Sparsholt Affair plumbs the ways the friendship between these two men will influence their lives—and the lives of others’—for decades to come. Richly observed and emotionally charged, this is a dazzling novel of fathers and sons, of family and legacy, and of the longing for permanence amid life’s inevitable transience.

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard Edward Manners - thirty three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life. Almost at once he falls in love with seventeen-year-old Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of the 1890s Belgian painter Edgard Orst. ‘A generous pinch of true wit’ Sunday Times

Alan Hollinghurst

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