Description

Young, gay, William Beckwith spends his time, and his trust fund, idly cruising London for erotic encounters. When he saves the life of an elderly man in a public convenience an unlikely job opportunity presents itself – the man, Lord Nantwich, is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to take a look at Nantwich’s diaries. But in the story he unravels, a tragedy of twentieth-century gay repression, lurk bitter truths about Will’s own privileged existence.

Publisher Review

The Swimming-Pool Library is a perfect debut, in that it arrives confidently, with a fully formed style and bank of themes that the author would go on to explore for years to come * Attitude * 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 * 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 * Sunday Times * 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 *