The Folding Star

Alan Hollinghurst’s 1995 novel is an enigmatic tale of obsession, mystery, lust and loss.  "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).

Edward Manners is 32 years old, gay, and disillusioned with his life in England. He arrives in an ancient Flemish city to work as a language tutor, also hoping to get some writing done. There, he becomes obsessed with one of his students, a 17-year-old boy named Luc Altidore. Their relationship quickly becomes a highly erotic one, but then Luc abruptly disappears.

"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

Alan Hollinghurst is a novelist, poet, short story writer and translator.  He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s, The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. His second novel, The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker Prize in 2004. The Sparsholt Affair was published in 2017.