★★★★

This is the third book I’ve read by Alan Hollinghurst, the others being The Line of Beauty and The Swimming Pool Library. Like those two novels, this book was beautifully and lyrically crafted. It occurs to me that Hollinghurst is particularly good at representing the allure of closed circles to outsiders. Those circles can be social, as we see in the third part of this book, when middle-class Paul finds himself in the charmed circle of Mrs Jacobs and her family. They can also be  circles of friendship or love, like the relationship between Cecil and George at the beginning of the book, of which innocent Daphne wants so much to be a part. But at what cost do we join such circles?

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