Direct Download: 20041202-alanhol.mp3

Born in Stroud, England, Alan Hollinghurst's debut novel, The Swimming-Pool Library, was lauded for its startling conflation of high literary style and low-rent sex, presenting an eye-popping trawl through London's pre-AIDS gay culture. Hollinghurst's style draws comparisons with Joyce and Nabokov, in particular for his Booker Prize-nominated novel, The Folding Star. The Line of Beauty picks up where The Swimming-Pool Library leaves off: as the boom years of the eighties unfold in Margaret Thatcher's England.