The title of Alan Hollinghurst’s brilliant novel ‘The Swimming Pool Library’ encapsulates, in four words, the reason I am a fan… The sensuality of a swimming pool – the dry erudition of a library; the novel similarly juxtaposes sexual themes with high literary style.

‘The Line of Beauty’, which won Hollinghurst the Man Booker Prize, also treads this line, between the mind and the body, the literary and the sensual.

His novels are also a chronicle of England. For example, ‘Our Evenings’, his latest novel, has been described as: ‘The best novel that’s been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years’.

Below is an amazing exhibition and exploration of the idea of The Library created by the writer and bibliophile Alberto Manguel. My private library, inhabited by ‘the ghosts of luminous words’, would certainly keep a shelf for Hollinghurst’s fiction.