THE FOLDING STAR

Edward manners - thirty-three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life. Almost at once he falls in love with seventeen-year-old Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of the 1890s Belgian painter Edgard Orst.

- The Folding Star is the story of Edward Manners, an Englishman who has arrived in Belgium to tutor two boys. One is bad and beautiful, the other sad and fat, and Edward falls in love with die former, though he also manages to fit in plenty of less idealised sex. The other boy‘s father is the curator of a museum devoted to the work of a Symbolist painter, Edgard Orst, whose life and work provide a rich sub-plot, drawing Edward intoan exploration of the Nazi past.
The subtly textured description of everyday life in the small Flemish town is interspersed with flashbacks to Edward‘s early life in England. In these sections the depiction of a close-knit, serious-minded family‘s unforced mutual rapport is realised with a convincing naturalness that opens out the novel. In some ways the minute of episodic gay Sex and grand aesthetic speculation, enlivened by a quizzical modern eye for the absurd, marks a return to the territory already staked out in The Swimming-Pooi Library. But the openness and range of this novel constitutes an advance on its already formidable predecessor, which it outshines in generosity, depth of characterisation and descriptive power - Candia McWilliam, Vogue

- The fine discrimination with which Hollinghurst uses words is matched by the exactness of his observations of human feeling. This can be both comical and affecting, sometimes both at once...Hollinghurst is agile enough to be able to write equally vividly about the graduations of colour in a cloudy sky and about the feel of someone else‘s tongue in one‘s mouth. And he does both in fine, musical prose. The contrast between the life of Edward‘s erudite, fastidious mind and that of his needy, ever ready body is a kind of running, never-explicit joke which infuses the book with a mix of suppressed hilarity and post-coital tristesse. Louche, melancholy, both sexually and intellectually potent, The Folding Star has its own distinctive atmosphere compounded of a grand 19th-century fin de siècle lusciousness, a seamy 2Oth- century fin de siècle carnality and a generous pinch of true wit-
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times