William Beckwith is a young man of twenty-five, homosexual, aristocratic, reasonably wealthy, happily promiscuous and decidedly hedonistic. One afternoon when he is flirting in some public toilets he saves the life of Lord Nantwich, an eccentric character, also homosexual but as old as the century, who went to the urinals to remember past glories and has suffered cardiac arrest. They meet again days later at Corinthian, a gymnastics club that the young Beckwith frequents and uses as a "hunting ground." Lord Nantwich, a former Crown official in Africa—and, like William, an admirer of young people of color—who knew Ronald Firbank and other leading figures of English gay culture, wants the young Beckwith to write his biography. He invites her to his house, allows her to glimpse the charms and splendors of the gay community in times past, and entrusts her with his diaries. The pool library unfolds as a vast, complex, joyful and sometimes bitter chronicle of gay life and culture in England, where past—Lord Nantwich—and present—William Beckwith—exhibit their objects of desire, fetishes, most or less sexual and amorous secrets, uses and customs. And Becwith will end up discovering that behind this dust was hidden that mud, and that his history and that of the old lord are much more inextricably linked than he had ever suspected.

«I don't know of any book, except Genet's Lolita and Our Lady of the Flowers, that is so literary and so intensely sexual at the same time... The Pool Library links two great traditions of English literature: the moral novel by Jane Austen and E. M. Forster, and the decadent novel, that of William Beckford, Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank.» (Edmund White)

«A great overview of English gay life almost throughout the entire century, somewhere between clandestinity and exhibitionism...» (Luis Antonio de Villena, El Mundo)