Cover of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst · 2004

A young gay man lodges with a Tory MP's family and mistakes proximity to power for belonging.

Nick Guest, a middle-class graduate with a thesis on Henry James, lodges with the family of a rising Conservative MP through the Thatcher years, and mistakes being tolerated for being included. Hollinghurst writes money, aesthetics and gay life in the shadow of AIDS with the same unhurried precision, and the class comedy sharpens into something colder. It won the Booker Prize in 2004.

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Tash Aw

Novelist

I knew this would be an instant classic the moment I read it. It tells of a man navigating class, sexuality, and capitalism in the cruel, heady days of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. One of the most important English novels of all time.

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