The Spell

Alan Hollinghurst’s tour-de-force debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, was a literary sensation. Edmund White called it “the best book on gay life yet written by an English author.” The Village Voice described it as “buoyant, smart, irrepressibly sexy…[with the] heft and resonance of a classic modernist novel.” The New York Times Book Review raved about its “shimmering elegance” and “camp-fired wit.” The New York Review of Books dubbed his second book, The Folding Star, a “miniature Remembrance of Things Past…an expanded Death in Venice…a homosexual Lolita.” The Spell is Hollinghurst’s most polished and entertaining novel to date. Here he marries Jane Austen’s delicious social asperity with a sly eroticism in a story as romantic and surprising as anything he has written. Set in London and the idyllic countryside, the narrative tracks the interlocking passions of four men. As each character falls successively under the spell of love or drugs, country living or urban glamour, The Spell unfurls into a richly witty picture of modern gay life…and of all human affairs of the heart.