The Swimming-Pool Library
Hollinghurst’s landmark novel of gay London
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Two gay lives, separated by class, age and history, begin to overlap. Hollinghurst turns biography into a portrait of desire, memory and inheritance.
Young 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 is Lord Nantwich, who is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to look through Nantwich’s diaries and finds himself drawn into a life that reaches back through Edwardian England, empire and the long history of gay repression.
As Will uncovers Nantwich’s story, bitter truths begin to emerge about his own privileged existence, his family and the freedoms he takes for granted.
Hollinghurst sets the pleasures of 1980s gay London against the lives that had to be hidden, prosecuted or half-erased before it. The result is a queer literary novel of unusual poise and force, alert to beauty, appetite and the uneasy inheritance of freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On entering a London public lavatory in blithe pursuit of quick, anonymous sex, beautiful and roguish young aristocrat William Beckwith isconfronted instead with an ancient, doddering member of the British House of Lords who, after muttering an incoherent string of polite non sequiturs, promptly keels over at his feet in embarrassed but undeniable coronary arrest. After saving the old man's life, Will is invited to tea by the grateful and slightly senile Lord Nantwich, who, surprised by Will's impressive lineage and appalled at his state of idle unemployment, engages the young man to write the Nantwich life story. Thus begins the unusual relationship that forms the core of this funny, sad and beautifully written novel. The Swimming Pool Library weaves a rich and fascinating tapestry of Britain's gay subculture spanning pre-World War I through the sexually abandoned early '80s, stopping short at the doorstep of AIDS. Hollinghurst's prose is fresh, witty and wise, and his ever-surprising, sinuously unfurling story is told with insouciant grace and unabashed sexuality. BOMC and QPBC alternates. .
