The Swimming-Pool Library

Two gay lives, separated by class, age and history, begin to overlap. Hollinghurst turns biography into a portrait of desire, memory and inheritance.

Young 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 is Lord Nantwich, who is seeking a biographer. Will agrees to look through Nantwich’s diaries and finds himself drawn into a life that reaches back through Edwardian England, empire and the long history of gay repression.

As Will uncovers Nantwich’s story, bitter truths begin to emerge about his own privileged existence, his family and the freedoms he takes for granted.

Hollinghurst sets the pleasures of 1980s gay London against the lives that had to be hidden, prosecuted or half-erased before it. The result is a queer literary novel of unusual poise and force, alert to beauty, appetite and the uneasy inheritance of freedom.