[]
The Swimming-Pool Library
  • Published: 1 September 2015
  • ISBN: 9781784870317
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

The Swimming-Pool Library

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Sept 2015
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Your Bookstore Abbeys Boomerang Find local retailers Find local retailers Collins Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Mighty Ape

'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: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. In 2025 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement, and knighted for services to literature. He lives in London.
AH

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