Alan Hollinghurst

In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby--whom Nick had idolized at Oxford--and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising...

"Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I'd lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice. Dave Win is thirteen years old in 1961, when he first goes to stay with the wealthy Hadlows, who sponsor his scholarship at a boarding school where their son Giles is his classmate....

Unfinished at the time of James's death in 1916, the Ivory Tower utilizes a classic Jamesian theme-American innocence transformed by European experience. Here, however, there's a twist: the hero was raised abroad and returns to America with its immense Gilded Age fortunes to discover the corrupting effects of wealth and possessions.