Alan Hollinghurst

Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. Reprint.

Comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, Justin, Danny and Alex. As each falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the clashing imperatives of gay life, the hunger for contact, the fear of commitment, and the need for permanence.

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening StandardEdward Manners - thirty three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life.

A literary sensation and bestseller both in England and America, 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. "Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything" (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of 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. "Easily one of [1988's] most important debuts...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." -- Village Voice Literary Supplement"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"Absorbing and delightful...some of the brightest, smartest writing to come along in a long time." -- Houston Post

A crucial year in the Britten/Auden relationship, which reshaped and redefined artistic direction in the immediate pre-war period. Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden were key figures of the 1930s, and here Donald Mitchell traces their lives during one crucial year, 1936. They worked hard to establish themselves, first through the GPO film unit, in a collaboration which flowered and spilled over into the theatre, and then radio - a new medium that the liveliest creative minds of the time were exploring and exploiting. Britten and Auden also joined forces in works destined for the recital room and concert hall, among them Our Hunting Fathers, the political symbolism of which Donald Mitchell examines in depth, and On the Island, settings of early Auden that comprised Britten's first important set of songs to English texts. Much use is made of Britten's private diaries, which he kept on a daily basis, and a revealing portrait emerges of the two men's relationship, of their work together in many different fields, and of the reflection within that work of political ideas current at the time. DONALD MITCHELL was Britten's close friend and publisher from 1964 until the end of the composer's life, and his authorised biographer. The T S Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered in 1979