The Swimming-Pool Library
  • Published: 1 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9781784870317
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $22.99

The Swimming-Pool Library

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Sep 2015
EBook
1 Aug 2011
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'Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny' Daily Telegraph

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.
  • Published: 1 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9781784870317
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $22.99
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About the author

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. His most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, was published in 2017.

Also by Alan Hollinghurst

The Spell
The Folding Star
See all

Praise for The Swimming-Pool Library

The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic début

Guardian

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

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

Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny

Daily Telegraph

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

This bold and emotional story is a must-read

Good Housekeeping UK
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