The Folding Star

Fourth printing. 8vo. Pp. [viii], 422, [2 (blank)]. Blue cloth boards, lettered in silver to spine; navy blue endpapers. Jacket design by Garner Russell, featuring a detail of a Howard Hodgkin illustration.

Inscribed by author to title-page.

Winner of the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). Shortlisted for the Booker Prize [subsequently won with The Line of Beauty in 2004]. Edward Manners, a disaffected thirty-three old Englishman, sets off for wintry Bruges in search of adventure. Landing a post as a tutor, he falls in love with his seventeen-year-old pupil, Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of 1890s Belgian Symbolist artist Edgard Orst.

Inspired by Georges Rodenbach's 1892 novel, Bruges-la-Morte, for whose 2005 newly issued English translation Hollinghurst provided an introduction, Hollinghurst's second novel has been described as being "chock-a-block with visual artefacts". The narrator made his first appearance in 'Sharps and Flats', a short story published in Granta 43, on 1st July 1993, the issue in which the author featured as one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists. "[B]eautifully written, perversely romantic... melancholy, both sexually and intellectually potent." –The Sunday Times

[Xavier Giudicelli, Englishness through the Looking Glass: Intersemiotic and Intercultural Dialogues in The Folding Star (Alan Hollinghurst, 1994) and Bruges-la-Morte (Georges Rodenbach, 1892)]