

In an era of endless possibility, he finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession with beauty-a prize as compelling to him as power and riches to his friends. It is the summer of 1983, and twenty-year-old Nick Guest has moved 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, who becomes both a friend to Nick and his uneasy responsibility.Īs the boom years of the mid-eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world-its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing.
