The Line of Beauty

The Line of Beauty is a novel by the English writer Alan Hollinghurst, published in 2004. It is set in Britain in three parts, in 1983, 1986 and 1987.

Nick Guest is middle class, from the fictional market town of Barwick in Northamptonshire, and has just taken a First in English at Worcester College, Oxford, where he is about to begin postgraduate work at University College London. He moves into an attic room in the Feddens' Notting Hill house in the summer of 1983, into the household of a Conservative MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, their son Toby, whom Nick had idolised at Oxford, and their daughter Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions and who becomes both Nick's friend and his uneasy responsibility. Many of the significant people in the novel are Nick's Oxford contemporaries, and the book works through the tension between his intimacy with the Feddens, whose parties and holidays he shares, and the realities of his life as a gay man, which the family accepts only to the extent of never mentioning it. The years it covers are those of the mid-1980s boom, and the emerging AIDS crisis forms the backdrop to its close.

Hollinghurst had published two earlier novels before this one, and the three-part structure follows Nick through three separate years of the decade it describes.