In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers. Alan Hollinghurst is the author of three previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, and The Spell. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black memorial Prize for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. He lives in London. Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for FictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2004It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility. As the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matter of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world—its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty—a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance, but it is a later affair with a beautiful millionaire that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade. Framed by the two election that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly funny, this is a major work by one of our finest writers. Winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize for FictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2004\"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the best prose we have today.\"—Edmund White \"This is the fourth novel by one of the best stylists in the English language and winner of this year's Booker Prize. It has a well-developed plot and a large cast of characters—at the center of which is a young man searching for love and purpose in Margaret Thatcher's England. But the rich Tories and bitter Laborites battling for control of Britain's soul take a back seat to the book's elegant but sturdy prose, which is as finely crafted as an ornamental design on an old vase or in the stonework of a church portal.\"—Michael Shelden, The Baltimore Sun\"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust did. Hollinghurst is never mocking or caricatural but subtly observant and completely participant. He writes the best prose we have today.\"—Edmund White \"A classic of our times. The work of a great English stylist in full maturity; a masterpiece.\"—The Observer\"Wonderful . . . almost unbelievably well-written . . . Finely wrought but tough, close -in observation.\"—Spectator \"A magnificent novel . . . There are literally thousands of impeccably nuanced touches.\"—Daily Telegraph \"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.\"—The Times Literary Supplement\"Britisher Hollinghurst isn't shy: At 400-plus pages sprinkled with references to Henry James, his fourth outing aspires to the status of an epic about sex, politics, money, and high society. Though he's best known for his elegant descriptions of gay male life and pitch-perfect prose, Hollinghurst is most striking here for his successful, often damning, observations about the vast divides between the ruling class and everyone else. It's 1983, and narrator Nick Guest, age 20, is literally a guest in the household of Conservative MP Gerald Fedden, whose son, Toby, Nick befriended at Oxford. Given an attic room and loosely assigned the task of looking after the Feddens' unstable manic-depressive daughter Catherine, Nick is given entree into a world of drunken, drug-laced parties at ancestral manors, high-stakes financial transactions, and politicians all obsessed with catching a glimpse of 'The Lady'—Thatcher herself (who finally does make a cameo—hilariously—toward the end) . . . More fascinating are Hollinghurst's incisive depictions of the brilliance and ease that insulate and animate the Feddens—especially the witty and difficult Gerald and the spectacular mess that is Catherine—and the crushing realization that Nick, unlike those around him, does not have the casual luxury to crash up his own life and survive. A beautifully realized portrait of a decade and a social class, but without a well-developed emotional core.\"—Kirkus Reviews \"Among its other wonders, this almost perfectly written novel . . . delineates what's arguably the most coruscating portrait of a plutocracy since Goya painted the Spanish Bourbons. To shade in the nuances of class, Hollingsworth uses plot the way it was meant to be used—not as a line of utility, but as a thematically connected sequence of events that creates its own mini-value system and symbols . . . While Hollinghurst's story has the true feel of Jamesian drama, it is the authorial intelligence illuminating otherwise trivial pieces of story business so as to make them seem alive and mysteriously significant that gives the most pleasure . . . This novel has the air of a classic.\"—Publishers Weekly