The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair.

An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions. "Exquisite." —The New York Times

“A buoyant, smart, irrepressibly sexy book . . . that has the heft and resonance of a classic modernist novel, the sprawl and surprise of an intimate memoir.” —The Village Voice Literary Supplement

“I can think of no other book that is at once so literary and so highly sexed, with the exception of Lolita and Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers.” —Edmund White

“The Swimming-Pool Library beautifully welds the standard conventions of fiction to a tale of modern transgressions. It tells of impurities with shimmering elegance, of complexities with a camp-fired wit and of truths with a fiction’s solid grace.” —The New York Times Book Review