The Swimming-Pool Library

Alan Hollinghurst's first novel is a tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristorcrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography. 'The Swimming Pool Library' 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.