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The Spell

'A sparkling celebration of sexual intrigue... stylish, original, bizarrely beautiful' - Francis Wyndham, Sunday Telegraph, Books of the Year

The Spell contains the most delicately sensuous portrait-painting...brilliant imagery...and hilarious cross-purpose jokes... Sentence by sentence the novel weaves its magic

A masterpiece of sustained literary titillation

Love, lust and loss among a group of middle-class gay Englishmen... Young and old, the town and the country, the wild and respectable: Holinghurst explores each of these uneasy conflicts with wit, generosity and sharply observed comedy

A bewitchingly beautiful tale... confirms his pre-eminence among the prose writers of his generation

Comic fantasy is grounded in a wealth of sharp observation and psychological insight. Hollinghurst has lost none of his authority

In its evocation of place, or, more exactly, of places in time, the book is masterful

Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. His most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair, was published in 2017.

Discover this ‘sparkling celebration of sexual intrigue’ (Telegraph) from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty. 
 
The Spell is a comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin, an architect in his late forties, who is trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his younger lover, Justin; Robin's 22 year old son Danny, a volatile beauty who lives for clubbing and casual sex; and the shy Alex, who is Justin's ex-boyfriend. 
 
As each in turn falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life. At once lyrical, sceptical and romantic, The Spell confirms Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain's most important novelists.

The Folding Star

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard

'As is typical of the best classics, he has fashioned a universal tale of sexual obsession, love and death out of a particular life'

'Even in its sexiest moments, it never loses its intellectual poise. Dry witticisms intersperse sweaty couplings...The Folding Star is a novel of considerable breadth.What gives it its depth is the candour, wit, sensuous immediacy and melancholy intelligence applied to it'

'Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's...[He ] is on as fine a form in this novel as his first'

'Grand 19th-century fin-de-siècle lusciousness, a seamy 20th-century carnality and a generous pinch of true wit'

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard 
 
 
Edward Manners - thirty three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life. Almost at once he falls in love with seventeen-year-old Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of the 1890s Belgian painter Edgard Orst. 
 
 
 ‘A generous pinch of true wit’ Sunday Times

Alan Hollinghurst

The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic début

Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny

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

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 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

This bold and emotional story is a must-read

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.

Alan Hollinghurst

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

Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny

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 con ...

The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic début

Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny

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 con ...

The first major novel in Britain to put gay life in its modern place and context... A historic novel and historic début

Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny

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 con ...

Books by Alan Hollinghurst

Series by Alan Hollinghurst

Vintage Desire

Articles featuring Alan Hollinghurst

What to read after watching It’s A Sin

Books that shaped the 1980s

Reading Remedy: books to help you deal with unrequited love

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