Edward Manners, a young British man in search of fresh air, arrives in a small Flemish town to teach English and soon falls in love with one of his students, Luc Altidore, an enigmatic seventeen-year-old boy who has just been expelled from the school.

While in England an old lover dies of AIDS, in the small Flemish town Edward meets a series of peculiar characters: Cherif, a Moroccan born in Paris who frequents the local gay bar; the eccentric Matt, who sells pornographic material and used underwear, and Paul Echevin, father of another of his students and director of the local museum, who introduces him to the devious world of Edgard Orst, a symbolist painter who died during the Nazi occupation, who lived a rapt passion for a famous actress and painted striking triptychs.

And like a triptych this novel is structured in which Hollinghurst demonstrates his talent to mix the refined and the sordid, and to delve into the ins and outs of desire and passions, masterfully combining tragedy and humor.

The Folding Star was a finalist and, according to many critics, a "moral winner" of the Booker Prize, which was ultimately not awarded for the explicitness of some scenes that apparently scandalized the jury. Double desire.