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Title details for The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst - Wait list

The Line of Beauty

by Alan Hollinghurst
Alex Jennings
Audiobook
0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 10 weeks
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0 of 3 copies available
Wait time: About 10 weeks

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.
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 26, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781529008616
      • File size: 496165 KB
      • Duration: 17:13:40

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Nick is a Jamesian scholar, obsessed with aesthetic beauty, who is coming of age against the backdrop of Thatcher-era England. He's an outsider--gay, living with the wealthy family of an Oxford mate whose father, Gerald, is a Tory MP--and often doesn't engage with the world around him so much as observe it. Alex Jennings's smooth, pleasant voice easily conveys Nick's internal observations, as well as all the class distinctions of a large cast of British characters--Gerald's upper-crust brusqueness; decadent Wani's lazy drawl; the Caribbean-tinged accent of Leo, Nick's first male lover. Hollinghurst's Booker Prize-winning novel is compelling, and Jennings navigates the waters of national, personal, and sexual politics with ease. J.M.D. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 20, 2004
      Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel, recently longlisted for the Mann Booker, delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be used—not as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols.
      The book is divided into three sections, dated 1983, 1986 and 1987. The protagonist, Nick Guest, is a James scholar in the making and a tripper in the fast gay culture of the time. The first section shows Nick moving into the Notting Hill mansion of Gerald Fedden, one of Thatcher's Tory MPs, at the request of the minister's son, Toby, Nick's all-too-straight Oxford crush. Nick becomes Toby's sister Catherine's confidante, securing his place in the house, and loses his virginity spectacularly to Leo, a black council worker. The next section jumps the reader ahead to a more sophisticated Nick. Leo has dropped out of the picture; cocaine, three-ways and another Oxford alum, the sinisterly alluring, wealthy Lebanese Wani Ouradi, have taken his place. Nick is dimly aware of running too many risks with Wani, and becomes accidentally aware that Gerald is running a few, too. Disaster comes in 1987, with a media scandal that engulfs Gerald and then entangles Nick.
      While Hollinghurst's story has the true feel of Jamesian drama, it is the authorial intelligence illuminating otherwise trivial pieces of story business so as to make them seem alive and mysteriously significant that gives the most pleasure. This is Nick coming home for the first and only time with the closeted Leo: "there were two front doors set side by side in the shallow recess of the porch. Leo applied himself to the right hand one, and it was one of those locks that require tender probings and tuggings, infinitesimal withdrawals, to get the key to turn." This novel has the air of a classic. Agent, Emma Parry. (Oct.)

      Forecast:
      Widely praised for his three previous novels, Hollinghurst (
      The Swimming-Pool Library) is primed for even greater acclaim and sales with this masterful volume, the latest in a wave of Jamesian novels
      .

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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