Лучшие книги Алана Холлингхерста

Ник Гест, молодой человек из небогатой семьи, по приглашению своего университетского приятеля поселяется в его роскошном лондонском доме, в семье члена британского парламента. В Англии царят золотые 80-е, когда наркотики и продажный секс еще не связываются в сознании юных прожигателей жизни с проблемой СПИДа. Ник - ценитель музыки, живописи, словесности, - будучи…

Young, gay, William Beckwith spends his time, and his trust fund, idly cruising London for erotic encounters. When he saves the life of an elderly man in a public convenience an unlikely job opportunity presents itself - the man, Lord Nantwich, is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to take a look at Nantwich's diaries. But in the story he unravels, a tragedy of twentieth-century gay repression, lurk bitter truths about Will's own privileged existence.

In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford to study engineering, though his sights are set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athletic, charismatic, he is unaware of his powerful effect on others—especially on Evert Dax, the lonely and romantic son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer himself. With the world at war, and the Blitz raging in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: a place of fleeting beauty, of secret liaisons under the cover of blackouts. A friendship develops between David and Evert that will influence their lives for decades to come.

Tout commence en 1913, dans le jardin de la maison de campagne des Sawle dans le Middlesex. Etudiant à Cambridge, le timide George Sawle a invité aux Deux Arpents un de ses camarades, l'aristocratique et énigmatique Cecil Valance. Ces jours dans la maison familiale et le poème qu'ils inspirent à Cecil vont changer leur destin. Et plus encore celui de Daphné, la sœur de George. En ce printemps où rien n'annonce les proches bouleversements de l'Histoire, un pacte se noue secrètement entre les trois jeunes gens, point de départ d'une fresque saisissante à travers le XXe siècle, par l'un des plus grands romanciers anglais contemporains.

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.

Here are the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, an architect in his late forties trying to build an idyllic life in Dorset with his young lover, Justin, a would-be actor increasingly disenchanted with the countryside; Robin's attractive and dangerously volatile twenty-two-year-old son Danny; and Justin's former boyfriend Alex, whose life is unexpectedly transformed by a night of house music and a tab of ecstasy.As each falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the illusions of love, and of the clashing imperatives of modern gay life: the hunger for contact and the fear of commitment, the need for permanence and the continual disruptions of sex. Ultimately, The Spell details the restlessness of every human heart.