Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time
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“The economy’s in ruins, no one’s got a job, and we just don’t care, it’s bliss.”

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

June 30, 2025 by Zirza 1 Comment

It’s 1983. Thatcher is at No. 10 and Nick Guest, age 21, has just graduated from Oxford University. He finds himself as a lodger at the house of a college friend, Toby, whose father Gerald Fedden has been elected as a promising new conservative MP. Nick, who comes from a solidly middle class background, finds himself a loose thread intricately woven into the upper class social fabric of the Freddens. Nick has the wrong background and the wrong predilections, and he knows it doesn’t take […]

Filed Under: Featured, Fiction Tagged With: Alan Hollinghurst, booker prize winner, LGBT fiction, literary fiction, London, the line of beauty

Zirza's CBR17 Review No:34 · Genres: Featured, Fiction · Tags: Alan Hollinghurst, booker prize winner, LGBT fiction, literary fiction, London, the line of beauty ·
Rating:
· 1 Comment

“It’s just make-believe for rich people”

March 25, 2017 by vel veeter 2 Comments

I enjoyed this novel just fine, but I will be thinking about it for awhile. For one, it’s just so effing clever in its construction and its story. In a way, it does the opposite of what I was annoyed by in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul, where he makes explicit reference to an author he’s parodying. This is a Henry James novel if homosexuality were not criminalized in England in the 19th/20th century. I know this because our main character is a graduate student […]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Alan Hollinghurst, the line of beauty

vel veeter's CBR9 Review No:124 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: Alan Hollinghurst, the line of beauty ·
Rating:
· 2 Comments


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