ALAN HOLLINGHURST

Date of Birth: May 26, 1954
Birthplace: Stroud, England
Current Residence: London, England
Education: Magdalen College, Oxford, England, B.A., 1975, M. Litt., 1979.
Profession: Lecturer in English at Magdalen College, 1977-78, Somerville College, 1979-80, and Corpus Christi College, 1981; Lecturer in English, University of London, London, England, 1982; Assistant editor, the Times Literary Supplement, 1982-90.

Happiness can depend on the glance of a stranger, caught and returned.
-Alan Hollinghurst

Like Hollinghurst's earlier novel (The Swimming-pool Library), this book excels at near-documentary portrayal—lusty, sardonic, beguiled, unillusioned--of the public and private rituals, routines, excitements and disappointments of gay life. Ranging from romantic obsession to anonymous sex in the undergrowth, from amused observation of a dinner-party to submersion in the symbolic shadows of nineteenth-century Decadent painting, making detours down literary and musical by-ways of the twentieth century, inspecting Gothic architecture and gay bars, two-way mirrors and differences between the placings of the eyes in Flemish and Italian Renaissance pictures, 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 about The Folding Star, Times Literary Supplement

Hollinghurst's title, "The Folding Star," refers to a line in a Milton poem about the evening star as the shepherd's signal to gather the sheep home. The novel is an elegaic tone poem to loss, to the shepherd's painful inability to discharge his duty. In beautifully shaped prose, it describes both joyless sex and tender longing. This admixture left me at once uneasy and awed.
-Dan Cryer, Newsday