The Swimming-Pool Library: A novel (Lambda Literary Award)

by Alan Hollinghurst

Overview

The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair.

An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307806604
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/21/2011
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	596,585
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

ALAN HOLLINGHURST is the author of the novels The Stranger's Child, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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.

Editorial Reviews

On entering a London public lavatory in blithe pursuit of quick, anonymous sex, beautiful and roguish young aristocrat William Beckwith isconfronted instead with an ancient, doddering member of the British House of Lords who, after muttering an incoherent string of polite non sequiturs, promptly keels over at his feet in embarrassed but undeniable coronary arrest. After saving the old man's life, Will is invited to tea by the grateful and slightly senile Lord Nantwich, who, surprised by Will's impressive lineage and appalled at his state of idle unemployment, engages the young man to write the Nantwich life story. Thus begins the unusual relationship that forms the core of this funny, sad and beautifully written novel. The Swimming Pool Library weaves a rich and fascinating tapestry of Britain's gay subculture spanning pre-World War I through the sexually abandoned early '80s, stopping short at the doorstep of AIDS. Hollinghurst's prose is fresh, witty and wise, and his ever-surprising, sinuously unfurling story is told with insouciant grace and unabashed sexuality. BOMC and QPBC alternates. (September) .

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This novel created quite a stir in Britain and will probably do so herefor it minces no words in providing a realistic glimpse of the gay lifestyle in pre-AIDS London. Yet the approach is much more ``literary'' than sensational, the author masterfully re-creating a sense of time and place and the social and cultural milieu in which gay men operated. The occasionally graphic descriptions of sex will likely upset some readers, but for most the aura of unselfconscious eroticism will provide a sense of authenticity that only adds to its impact. Still, this is not a nostalgia piece; the author clearly understands that the freedom to satisfy lust often interferes with the ability to find fulfillment and love. Perceptive and well written; belongs in most academic and public libraries. David W. Henderson, Eckered Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.

Library Journal

"Exquisite." —The New York Times

“A buoyant, smart, irrepressibly sexy book . . . that has the heft and resonance of a classic modernist novel, the sprawl and surprise of an intimate memoir.” —The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“I can think of no other book that is at once so literary and so highly sexed, with the exception of Lolita and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.” —Edmund White

“The Swimming-Pool Library 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.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Sam West’s reading of this 1988 novel by Alan Hollinghurst, whose recent LINE OF BEAUTY won the Man Booker Prize, is delicate, artful, and beautifully modulated. The story takes place in the entirely male world of a young playboy aristocrat, Will Beckwith, who saves the life of elderly Lord Nantwich when the latter suffers a heart attack at their London sports club. Their two stories, which then become entwined, are relentlessly homoerotic; if Hollinghurst is holding back any graphic details, this reviewer can’t imagine what they could be. It’s an ambitious book with a complex structure and a shattering point to make, beautifully realized and performed, but the subject matter will not be for everyone, and would be seriously unsuitable for some audiences. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

FEB/MAR 07 - AudioFile