The Line of Beauty

In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Tory MP Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby – whom Nick had idolized at Oxford – and Catherine, always standing at a critical angle to the family and its assumptions and ambitions. As the Thatcher boom-years unfold, Nick, an innocent in the worlds of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of the glamorous family he is entangled with. Two vividly contrasting love-affairs, with a young black clerk and a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to him as that of power and riches to his friends.

I know it has been a week or so since I last posted... unacceptable I know. To reward you all for the wait... here's a brand new review and it's a really great book! This book was recommended by a friend of mine a while ago who kept going on about how good it was. Now for me, that's never a good thing. Recommendations? Fine. But when people continue to go on about how good it is, I just feel that, inevitably, I will be disappointed. With Alan Hollinghurt's Booker-winning The Line of Beauty, however, this was not so.

This book has that 'tone' I always rabbit on about. That 'tone' that I can't put my finger on but I just love. Sadie Jones has it, Richard Yates has it, and this book is, dare I say it, ever-so-slightly Gatsby-esque. A man named Nick, an outsider, becomes entangled and obsessed with a new and exciting world that he doesn't altogether agree with but just can't ignore.

There's something captivating about watching someone become so enraptured by another world. By 'another world', I don't just mean the house Nick moves into, but London as a whole. Its vibrance, its danger, its politics etc.

On top of this, Hollinghurst writes brilliantly and there's no fuss here. It's a political book, certainly, but don't let that put you off. There are love affairs, locked gardens, humour, awkward truths... you name it.

Really recommend this book. 9/10