Swimming Pool Library (Vintage International)

Hollinghurst, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679722564 ISBN 13: 9780679722564

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1989

The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The book focuses on two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.
"The Swimming-Pool Library 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."-- "New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Exquisite." --The New York Times

"A buoyant, smart, irrepressibly sexy book . . . that has the heft and resonance of a classic modernist novel, the sprawl and surprise of an intimate memoir." --The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"I can think of no other book that is at once so literary and so highly sexed, with the exception of Lolita and Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers." --Edmund White

"The Swimming-Pool Library 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 New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher:

‘Deserves first prize in every category... superbly written, wildly funny’ Daily Telegraph