2004 Man Booker Prize Shortlist

Information and Book Review

The Line of Beauty
General Information
	The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst Published by Picador UK Publication Date: 4/16/04
About the Author
	Alan Hollinghurst was born in May 1954 in Gloucestershire. He studied and then taught English at Oxford. His previous novels are The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Folding Star (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Spell. For several years he was the Deputy Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and was one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 1993. Alan Hollinghurst lives in London.
Publisher's Comments	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 children Toby and Catherine. As the boom-years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world, with its grand parties, its holidays in the Dordogne, its parade of monsters both comic and threatening. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.
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