Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel is a tour de force : a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography. (20050324)

From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families’ lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.
Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism—The Stranger’s Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves 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.

As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends.

Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.

霍林赫斯特在三十四歲出版的第一部作品《游泳池更衣室》（The Swimming-Pool Library，一九八八年出版）可以说是部披了同志小說外衣的歷史小說，有點像披了羊皮的狼。霍林赫斯特愛玩文字遊戲，連書名也不放過。《游泳池更衣室》通常直接按照英文書名譯為《游泳池圖書館》，但什麼是「游泳池圖書館」，以及「游泳池圖書館員」？太玄了吧？其實，解釋藏在書中第七章。主人翁在小時候就讀貴族中學（霍林赫斯特特別愛寫貴族中學、貴族大學的生活──可見他特別懷舊，對上流社會又愛又恨），該校習慣用「圖書館員」一詞來稱「股長」之類的學生職位。台灣中小學的「風紀股長」可以按照這種邏輯改叫「風紀圖書館員」；英國中學的「田徑圖書館員」當然不掌管書。「游泳池圖書館員」就是「游泳股長」，而這個股長平時打混的地方，泳池更衣室──一個充滿性幻想、窺視、曝露的純男空間──就成了游泳池圖書館。
艾倫‧霍林赫斯特（Alan Hollinghurst）最讓人津津樂道之處，大概是他描寫男同志肉慾場面的功力。此君一寫起俊美少年尤其欲罷不能，將美男的一顰一笑盡收書裡。要把男同志情慾寫得秀色可餐不簡單，而把「小小的」同志情慾和「澎湃的」歷史視野交織揉合更是挑戰。
作者將《游泳池更衣室》題獻給一位只活到二十五歲的「尼克」君，尼克這個名字對原作者應該極具意義；但，文學史上有個頂頂大名的旁觀者也叫尼克──費茲傑羅的《大亨小傳》就是透過尼克的眼去觀視大亨蓋茲比的世界。

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves 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. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.

This is Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since "The Line of Beauty", winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in "The Line of Beauty", his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, "The Stranger's Child" is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.

The 1995 Booker Prize finalist finally back in print. Alan Hollinghurst's hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected 33-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfillable, annihilating desire. Alan Hollinghurst is the author of "The Swimming-Pool Library" and "The Spell." He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, "The Line of Beauty," " "won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London. Finalist for the 1994 Booker Prize Alan Hollinghurst's hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected thirty-three-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfillable, annihilating desire. "An immense pleasure to read, filled with] funniness and poetry, handled with amazing sensitivity and accuracy."--"The New York Review of Books""" "Alan Hollinghurst may be the best living writer of erotic fiction, gay or straight . . . he renders with haunting precision love's merging of language and lust."--"The Boston Phoenix" "His fluid prose, with its dense accruing of detail and richly allusive quality, is that of an early modern writer. Hollinghurst is closer to Mann or Nabokov than to his contemporaries."--"The Boston Globe""" " This novel] splendidly evokes an airless, achy melancholy set off by unrequited love in a story as laden with emotion as it is shaped by artistry."--"Newsday" "Hollinghurst's prose is a genuine achievement--lavish, poised, sinuously alert."--"The New Republic" "Middle-aged Edward comes to a Flemish city to teach English only to fall in love with one of his pupils and to become involved with an obsessive artist who is playing a dangerous psychological game. Readers who relish psychological depth will find this includes plenty of drama and intrigue."--"The Midwest Book Review" "Sensibility overwhelms narrative in this story of homoerotic obsession, a second novel from the British Hollinghurst (The Swimming-Pool Library, 1988). Pudgy, bespectacled Edward Manners is a 32-year-old gay Englishman just arrived in an unidentified Flemish town, where he will give English lessons to two students, pursue his own 'bits of writing, ' and check out the gay scene--a Continental adventure before the onset of middle age. In short order, he finds a sex partner (Cherif, a hot young Moroccan) and falls in love with one of his students, 17-year-old Luc Altidore, 'a blond Aztec' expelled from an exclusive Jesuit school for serious truancy. Edward does not declare his love, though his theft of his beloved's underwear is a symptom of his obsession, an obsession he finds paralleled in the life of local Symbolist painter Edgard Orst (1865-1944) while working on a catalogue for the Orst Museum. Orst became obsessed with a Scottish actress. Though their affair was cut short when she drowned at sea, Orst painted her for the rest of his life. Edward starts to see Luc's eyes as those of an 'Orst temptress;' he is fascinated by the story, appropriately, for he is a pedant/aesthete whose most passionate outburst is reserved for a Muzak rendition of Mozart in a hotel dining room. Edward's cultural and sexual history is detailed further when he returns to England for the funeral of his one great love; as teenagers, they made love beneath Milton's 'folding star.'"--"Kirkus Reviews" "Hollinghurst's ("The Swimming Pool Library") erotic novel of a language tutor's obsession with his teenage pupil was a Booker Prize finalist."--"Publishers Weekly"

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford, but in his London life it will be the troubled Catherine who becomes his friend and his uneasy responsibility. At the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens' world. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.

Edward Manners - thirty three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life. Almost at once he falls in love with seventeen-year-old Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of the 1890s Belgian painter Edgard Orst. (20050324)

This is Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since "The Line of Beauty", winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in "The Line of Beauty", his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, "The Stranger's Child" is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.

布克獎得主Alan Hollinghurst擅長描寫男同志之間的情慾曖昧，露骨卻不流於低俗，04年BOOK PRIZE的得獎作品《The Line of Beauty》與前幾本創作也都是以男同志間的故事為主。而這本創作於1998年的《Spell》也不例外，是一部同性戀的風尚諧劇，小說講述了一名已經36歲的政府外交官員Alex，對他朋友22歲的兒子產生了情愫。《The Spell》處處洋溢著Alan Hollinghurst擅長的機敏對話與人物的鮮明性格。

From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty : a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
In the summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s home outside London. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him. That weekend, Cecil writes a poem that, after he is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.

From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families’ lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.
Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism— The Stranger’s Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.

In 1940, Evert Dax and David Sparsholt, two young men from very different backgrounds, meet at Oxford University. Dax is a second year student reading English, coming from a rackety upper middle class background; Sparsholt is from a humbler Midlands community and is reading engineering, a young man whose good looks and fine figure have proved highly attractive to his peers.
This time is a unique one in the history of the university: with military call-up at twenty, soon brought forward to nineteen, almost all students come up to Oxford knowing that they will only have a year or so of study. A sense of futility is mixed with one of recklessness. All life after dusk is lived under black-out, encouraging and covering what would normally be impossible liaisons. What happens to these two men in this year will affect many lives and will set in motion the mystery at the heart of The Sparsholt Affair.
Alan Hollinghurst's masterly novel takes us through several generations and across key periods of uncertainty and change in British society. From the darkest days of the Second World War, it moves to the changing world of the a socially and sexually liberated London of the 1960s, before landing in the mid-1970s, with the three-day week, fuel shortages and power cuts. The reverberations continue through the next generation in the 1990s before reaching a conclusion in the present decade, a world of new media and new ideas.
Throughout the novel there is also an examination of the visual and aesthetic, looking at what it is to be Modern, through modernist architecture and abstract painting: we witness buildings being destroyed and replaced; we watch works of art go in and out of fashion.
Featuring a remarkable cast of characters, The Sparsholt Affair is both thought-provoking and highly entertaining, a novel in which children are connected by the acts of their parents and individuals are both damaged and saved by the changing attitudes to sexuality, privacy and intimacy.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker • The Winnipeg Free Press • The Guardian • TIME • The Irish Times • Kirkus Reviews • Publishers Weekly • Slate
A New York Times Notable Book of 2024

From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

"The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time." —The Guardian

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

This is “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.