The Line of Beauty: A Novel
by Alan Hollinghurst
Buy on Amazon20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens. An innocent in matters of politics and money, he 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.
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"This book was his smash hit. It tells the story of a young man and his sexual awakening. It’s a love story and it’s super sexy. At the time, it was considered pretty wild. I don’t think there’d been a state-of-the-nation novel quite like it. It was a real commentary on Thatcher’s Britain and the sexual revolution that the young man was going through. Hollinghurst writes it beautifully. It’s a very complete novel. He’s got a novelistic way of writing. You’re really in there, in the story with this young man. The Line of Beauty is the novel to go to if you want sexy, illicit Thatcher’s Britain writ large. As I said, it takes a few decades for a national trauma to reach the surface. There’s my book, Fallout, and also a great film by Barbara Santi called Gentle, Angry Women , which came out last year. We are all talking about the early 1980s and the threat of nuclear war. I would have loved to put Milkman (2018) by Anna Burns on this list, but that’s set in the 1970s. She’s writing about the trauma of the Troubles in Northern Ireland ."
The Best Historical Novels Set in the 1980s · fivebooks.com