'Both classic and modern, Alan Hollinghurst... imbues human nature and interaction with a timeless, monumental quality' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'Surveying the era's self-interested mood from the highest social vantage point, Hollinghurst's book is [an] immaculate time capsule.' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Must rank among the funniest [novels] ever written about Thatcher's Britain, while remaining one of the most tragically sad. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Luminous... [an] astonishingly Jamesian novel. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

‘Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty is the best new novel I have read for some years.’ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

‘Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty is the first Booker prize winner in years to deserve it…’ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

‘... it is perhaps the book that Henry James would have written if he were alive now.’ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

‘Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it.’ --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'How to recommend last year's Booker-winner highly enough? It's hard - Hollinghurst's Eighties-set soap is hypnotically good.' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

'the best-deserving Booker winner ever' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 two children, Toby - whom Nick had idolized at Oxford - and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions.

As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to him as that of power and riches to his friends.

Starting at the moment The Swimming-Pool Library ended, The Line of Beauty traces the further history of a decade of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, it is a major work by one of the finest writers in the English language. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star and The Spell. He lives in London. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.