Nick Guest lives in a Tory MP's Notting Hill house during the Thatcher years, navigating class, cocaine, and gay London. Hollinghurst won the Booker in 2004 with a novel that is both a social comedy of manners and an AIDS elegy. The prose is gorgeous and exact. Henry James filtered through 1980s hedonism, which sounds unlikely but works.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.