A literary sensation and bestseller in both England and America, The Swimming-Pool Library is an enthralling, darkly erotic novel of gay life before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with total impunity. “Impeccably composed and meticulously particular in its observation of everything” (Harpers & Queen), it focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, an old Africa hand, searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.