Our June Author: Alan Hollinghurst

Here are some links for our June selection, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. Readings has an interview and the Guardian offers a couple of profiles here, and here.

"From the start I've tried to write books which began from a presumption of the gayness of the narrative position," says Hollinghurst. "To write about gay life from a gay perspective unapologetically and as naturally as most novels are written from a heterosexual position. When I started writing, that seemed a rather urgent and interesting thing to do. It hadn't really been done."

The BBC has a site for the mini-series based on the book and you can read an interview with Hollinghurst and director Andrew Davies abou the adaptation at Time Out London. A peek at the series is available here.

If you want to bone up on your Henry James to enhance your appreciation of the novel, this site seems to be an exhaustive (exhausting?) set of links

For June: The Line of Beauty

For June we have selected another Booker Prize winner, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty:

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 is a major work by one of our finest writers.