Book Rec of the Day 3/20/2007

A portrait of life in 1980s London, The Line of Beauty is the first novel with a gay theme to have won the Man Booker Prize, England’s most prestigious literary award. Nick Guest, a scholar of Henry James, is invited to stay at the family home of his school chum Toby Fedden. Nick is swept into the Fedden’s glamorous life of parties and political maneuvers, but he may not be able to handle the excesses of the era. Hollinghurst’s elegant prose and his finely observed social interactions may just remind you of James’s works.

THE LINE OF BEAUTY, by Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 2005)