Description

Two gay lives, separated by class, age and history, begin to overlap. Hollinghurst turns biography into a portrait of desire, memory and inheritance.

Young 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 is Lord Nantwich, who is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to look through Nantwich’s diaries and finds himself drawn into a life that reaches back through Edwardian England, empire and the long history of gay repression.

As Will uncovers Nantwich’s story, bitter truths begin to emerge about his own privileged existence, his family and the freedoms he takes for granted.

Hollinghurst sets the pleasures of 1980s gay London against the lives that had to be hidden, prosecuted or half-erased before it. The result is a queer literary novel of unusual poise and force, alert to beauty, appetite and the uneasy inheritance of freedom.

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 *