num_pages: 438
description: It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility.As the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world--its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty--a prize as compelling to him as power and riches to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance, but it is a later affair with a beautiful millionaire that will change his life drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.Framed by the two general elections that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly funny, this is a major work by one of our finest writers. (front flap)
language: English
title: The Line of Beauty
titlecomplete: The Line of Beauty
genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, British Literature, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Gay
ratings_count: 27546
places: London, England, United Kingdom
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Booker Prize, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Literature, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Gay Fiction, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction
publisher: Bloomsbury