A film version, adapted by Andrew Davies and directed by Saul Dibb, was released in 2006.

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Conclusion

Hollinghurst acknowledges the deliberate mysteriousness of his titles. The Swimming-Pool Library, for example, makes no immediate sense to anyone who was not educated at a prep school where senior boys who wield authority over younger ones are known as "librarians." Yet the title serves as a metaphysical conceit, boldly yoking together spaces variously athletic and intellectual that are traditionally unrelated in order provocatively to suggest that a place of physical exercise and sexual cruising might function as the occasion for academic research or the general pursuit of knowledge.

Likewise, The Folding Star derives from a pastoral image in Milton's Comus, the appearance of the evening star signaling to the shepherd that it is time to lead his flock from the field safely home to the fold. The allusion ironically invests Edward Manners with the functions of Milton's Attendant Spirit, who is charged with guiding lost youth through the dark forest of experience, particularly sexual experience.

And The Line of Beauty subversively makes use of a technical term in eighteenth-century aesthetics and architectural design to describe the curving dip in a man's lower back before it flares out again in the fullness of the buttocks, thus highlighting the novel's pronounced anal eroticism. "Line" also suggests Nick and Wani's growing reliance upon cocaine to produce a feeling of euphoria during tedious social events, and as a stimulus during their sexual three-ways with the partners they bring home.

Hollinghurst's titles admit of multiple, rich, yet initially puzzling constructions whose full and oftentimes surprising significance emerges only as each novel's plot unfolds. In much the same way, the reader's knowledge of Hollinghurst's principal characters, and even a protagonists's knowledge of himself, invariably proves incomplete or misguided for the greater part of the novel. Hollinghurst's characters deepen as enigmas as their contradictions emerge and ambiguities heighten--often, ironically, as they go about their daily routines, performing perfectly mundane tasks.

Readers may be unsettled by the lack of moral absolutes in Hollinghurst's works. Desire proves to be a motivating force that renders one alternately caring and selfish, mysterious and pedestrian. For example, is Matt a charismatic sexual adventurer besieged by a naively enamored Luc, or a cynical opportunist who went about seducing the boy after Edward foolishly enlisted Matt's help spying on Luc and his friends? Is he a farcically inept pornographer guilty only of attempting to make money the easiest way that he can, or is he somehow responsible for the death of a local hustler, whose body was found floating in a canal, and whom Edward recognizes by his tattoo as one of the faceless actors in one of Matt's cheap films? Hollinghurst leaves the reader to ponder the enigma of Matt, who is as often repellent as he is alluring.

Hollinghurst's novels prove him to be a poet of moral ambiguity, who can be as archly witty as Ronald Firbank and Vladimir Nabokov, and as psychologically astute as Henry James and Marcel Proust.

The contemporary literary awards given specifically to honor glbtq books may be seen as an outgrowth of the modern American gay rights movement, so intertwined are they with the movement for equality.

Perhaps no other book has been more influential--for better or worse--in determining the construction of gay and lesbian identity in the modern world, as well as social attitudes toward homosexuality, than the Bible.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

The symbolist movement in painting and literature, which flourished in Europe from 1886 to 1905, was the first self-consciously queer movement in Western art history.

French semiotician Roland Barthes argued that the reintroduction of the sentimentality of love into sexuality would be the ultimate transgression.

American writer Peter Cameron is renowned for his astute explorations of the shifting, impulsive emotions of his characters and for his elegant, intoxicating dialogue.

Ronald Firbank's witty, campy novels mock the dominant homophobic, materialistic culture of early twentieth-century England.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

English novelist and short story writer L. P. Hartley created psychologically subtle works of fiction in which the danger of abandoning oneself to love is a recurrent theme.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

Though closeted, Henry James had a number of intimate relations with young men, and his sexual orientation imbued his fiction.

One of Germany's greatest twentieth-century authors, Thomas Mann encoded his own homosexuality in his novels but thought that homosexuality led to the destruction of social institutions and the death of the individual homosexual.

Texas-reared Terrence McNally, whose first play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, was one of the great scandals of the 1964 New York season, emerged in the 1990s as America's most important gay playwright since Tennessee Williams.

Mark Merlis is a novelist of unusual imaginative and linguistic power who examines contemporary gay concerns through the filter of historical parallels.

While Milton accepted the biblical condemnation of sodomy, some of his works suggest that his attitude toward same-sex relations was enlightened for his age.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

Because his writing stresses liberation, the French "boy-poet" Arthur Rimbaud, whose art is based solely on his individual creativity, is a progenitor of modern gay poetics.

One of the most prominent and highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay literature, Edmund White works in many distinct categories of fiction and nonfiction.

The Wolfenden Report, a 1957 British government study, recommended that homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private no longer be criminalized in England.