Where to start with Alan Hollinghurst

British novelist, born 1954. Won the Booker Prize in 2004.

Best Alan Hollinghurst book to start with: The Line of Beauty (2004), on 6 of the 16 lists it could have made.

The Line of Beauty, his Booker winner from 2004, is the most accessible of his novels and the one to read first. A young man from a modest background lodges in the house of a Conservative MP in 1980s London and gets drawn into the decade’s money and glamour. His sentences are elaborate and funny, and the book is frank about sex.

The Swimming Pool Library is his first novel. It is more explicit and more stylish, set in 1980s London as well, and it is the one to read second. The Folding Star, shortlisted for the Booker in 1994, is set in an unnamed Belgian city and follows a teacher obsessed with a student, and it is the slowest and strangest of the four. The Stranger’s Child, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2012, covers about a century and is the broadest in scope. Read it last, once you know his ear for a conversation.