The Swimming-Pool Library
Published on 7. September 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-0-09-926813-0 (ISBN)
Description
Alan Hollinghurst's first novel is a tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography. By the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty.
Reviews / Votes
"'Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny' Daily Telegraph 'The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic debut' - Guardian 'The tautness and energy of Alan Hollinghurst's novel derive from its ambiguous status a it shimmers somewhere between pastoral romance and sulphurous confession, between an affectionate and credible rendering of contemporary mores and lurid melodrama...classic English prose...surely the best book about gay life yet written by an English author' - Edmund White, Sunday Times 'Beautifully welds the standard conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions. It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complexities with a camp-fired wit and of truths with a fiction's solid grace' - New York Times Book Review"More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 199 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
252 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-09-926813-0 (9780099268130)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Alan Hollinghurst
The Swimming-Pool Library
E-Book
09/2010
1st Edition
Vintage Digital
€8.99
Available for download
Person
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 (1988), and was selected as one of the Best 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. He has since written The Spell and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995.