Line of Beauty

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books 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.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. Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

A classic of our times . . . The work of a great English stylist in full maturity. A masterpiece, As good as the English novel gets. Almost every sentence is a thing of beauty, There is something memorable on every page . . . there is much to savour in The Line of Beauty, not least its humour, a shivering yet morally exacting satire that leaves no character untouched, Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving. A brilliantly comical and accurate satire upon the high noon of Mrs Thatcher, The immaculate rolling cadences of his novel are the keenest pleasure English prose has to offer

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of several novels including The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.