It is the summer of 1983, and 20-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-- whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-- and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. Framed by the two general elections that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.

It is the summer of 1983, and 20-year-old Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-- whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-- and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. Framed by the two general elections that returned Margaret Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.

As the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world -- its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obession with beauty -- a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black clerk gives him his first experience of romance, but it is a later affair with a beautiful millionaire that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.

"The Good of the novel" brings together some of today's most strenuous and perceptive critics, several of them novelists themselves, and puts them in contact with some of the finest novels of the past three decades . . ."--Book cover.