The Line of Beauty

A tour de force: a darkly erotic work that centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.

It is January 1895 and Henry James's play, Guy Domville, from which he hoped to make his fortune, has failed on the London stage. Opening with this disaster, The Master spans the next five years of James's life, during which time he moves to Rye in Sussex, having found his dream retreat.

Comedy of sexual manners that follows the interlocking affairs of four men: Robin Woodfield, Justin, Danny and Alex. As each falls under the spell of romance or drugs, country living or rough trade, a richly ironic picture emerges of the clashing imperatives of gay life, the hunger for contact, the fear of commitment, and the need for permanence.

In Blackwater in the early 1990s, three women - Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen - have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen's adored brother Declan is dying. Two friends join him and the women in an old house, where the six of them must listen and come to terms with one another.

A middle-aged American works out in a Paris gym - an ordinary day, except that he catches the eye of a stranger, Julien, a young French architect with a gleam in his eye. Slowly, life takes on the colour of romance. But there is sadness in Julien's past and a grim cloud on the horizon.

Named after Haydn's work, in which the players leave the stage one by one, this completes the story of a gay man in his adult years, through Stonewall riots, the hedonism of the 70s and the ravages of AIDS in the 80s and 90s. It follows A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. This is a novel about how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

Beginning as a humble apprentice in Morecambe Bay, Cy flees to America, where he sets up his own tattoo business on the infamous Coney Island boardwalk. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak shows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious circus performer.

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 1890's Belgian painter Edgard Orst.

Cousins Roger and Alistair become lifelong friends when they meet as boys in 1954. They discover their homosexuality and their lives intersect against the backdrop of 20th-century gay culture, from the beachboy surfer days of the 1960s, to Greenwich Village AIDS activism in the 1990s.