The Swimming-Pool Library

Format:

Buy the book from:

Amazon Blackwells Bookshop.org Foyles Hive TGJones Waterstones

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.

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

About Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. In 2025 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement, and knighted for services to literature. He lives in London.

Learn more

Details