Our Evenings

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, heartbreaking but wickedly funny portrait of England spanning six decades. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence, from one of the finest writers of our age.

Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.

As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling against convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.

Our Evenings is the intimate and touching story of Dave Win’s life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company. Then, a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.

Review

The best novel that’s been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It’s funny but desperately moving too ― The Sunday Times

The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time ― The Guardian

A triumph . . . With his seventh novel, Our Evenings, the Booker-winning writer proves that his talents as a keen noticer of the world have only deepened . . . Gems of observation and insight on every page ― The Telegraph

A truly astonishing novel, by turns delicate and ferocious, radical in the way it explores questions of race, class, sexuality and origins in a genteel English Home Counties setting . . . The novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end -- Tash Aw, Booker Prize-nominated author of The South


A moving novel, written with beautiful poise and a wonderful grasp of life’s detail that singles Hollinghurst’s voice out. He writes of male concerns and love with true subtlety and feeling ― Big Issue

Our Evenings cements Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain’s best novelists . . . Written in sentences that are often arch and always effortless, it’s a remarkable, richly humane novel ― i news

Our Evenings is a work of such expansive, affecting brilliance and is a must for the Booker Prize next year . . . There is richness aplenty on these pages: acute social comedy, potent set pieces, some mesmerisingly beautiful distillations of atmosphere and emotion. It’s all woven masterfully into an intimate first-person meditation on modern England . . . A work of such expansive, affecting brilliance ― Daily Mail

I’m not sure any living writer is quite as good as taking you there so immersively that you take in the feel of things . . . at his best Hollinghurst is almost Austenian in his eye for social comedy ― The Financial Times

About the Author

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.