Folding Star (Shortlisted For Booker Prize For Fiction 1994)

Description:
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 1890's Belgian painter Edgard Orst.

Review:
' 'As is typical of the best classics, he has fashioned a universal tale of sexual obsession, love and death out of a particular life' - Marie Claire. 'Even in its sexiest moments, it never loses its intellectual poise. Dry witticisms intersperse sweaty couplings... The Folding Star is a novel of considerable breadth. What gives it its depth is the candour, wit, sensuous immediacy and melancholy intelligence applied to it' - Peter Kemp, Times Literary Supplement. 'Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's...[He] is on as fine a form in this novel as his first' - Tom Shone, Spectator. 'Grand 19th-century fin-de-siecle lusciousness, a seamy 20th-century carnality and a generous pinch of true wit' - Sunday Times'

Prizes:
Winner of James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction) 1994.
Winner of James Tait Black Memorial Book Prizes: Fiction 1994.
Shortlisted for Booker Prize for Fiction 1994.

Author Biography:
Alan Hollinghurst was born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), and was selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. He has since written The Spell. He was on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1995.