The Swimming-Pool Library

‘A lost world of louche living and erotic late-night liaisons...that still carries an illicit thrill’ Vogue

Will spends his days, and his trust fund, idly cruising 1980s London for erotic encounters – until a chance meeting with an older man draws him to unravel a tragic tale of repression that leads far too close to home.

A literary mystery, an erotic tour de force, The Swimming-Pool Library recalls a lost queer London with vivid clarity and masterfully uncovers its secrets.

‘A work of revolutionary candor that laid bare, in exquisite prose, the cut and thrust of queer existence.’ New Yorker

Vintage Desire: classic stories of lust and longing.

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.
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