Edward Manners - thirty three and disaffected - escapes to a Flemish city in search of a new life. Almost at once he falls in love with seventeen-year-old Luc, and is introduced to the twilight world of the 1890s Belgian painter Edgard Orst.

Alan Hollinghurstwas born in 1954. He is the author of one of the most highly praised first novels to appear in the 1980s,The Swimming-Pool Library, and was selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists 1993. His second novel,The Folding Star, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize. His novelThe Line of Beautywon the Booker Prize in 2004.

'An extraordinary book which takes the reader into a world of obsession and mystery...The Folding Star is lit by insight and humour' Evening Standard