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Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience. 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 with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.
Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.
Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Paperback Published 8 October 2024 496 pages
Read and Reviewed by Graeme:
"This expansive novel sweeps across the life of its main character Dave Win from a teenager at boarding school, through a career in the theatre and television, various love affairs and relationships, until finally finding his husband in his sixties. The opening chapters find Dave visiting the Hadlows, a wealthy family who pay his scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. These scenes on a rural estate conjure up echoes of The Line of Beauty, yet plenty more is fresh and new and more attuned to our contemporary times. For starters, the main character Dave is mixed race - half English, half Burmese - although details on his Burmese father are not easily pried out of his mother, Avril, a dressmaker. And the Hadlows turn out to be secondary characters who are ‘off stage’ for much of the novel, although the son, Giles Hadlow, Dave’s peer at school and his tormentor, looms large. Giles becomes a prominent person in politics and public life, a Conservative M.P. and then the face of Brexit. Yet the novel is often surprising, and doesn’t follow the direction the reader might expect. Some incidents occur and the outcome might not be explained until several hundred pages later, while sometimes it’s never explained. Finally towards the very end of the novel some detail on Dave’s mysterious father emerges. As the novel progress, the time jumps become more abrupt, and we rather dash through Dave’s decades of middle age and into older age. Yet Hollinghurst’s wit is in fine form, particularly when it’s Giles being skewered. One of the best scenes in the book has Giles flying in by helicopter in his capacity as Minister of the Arts to attend a performance Dave is appearing in. But in many ways the novel is more about Dave’s relationship with his mother, than his relationships with any men, and Avril turns out to be a very unconventional woman in small-town England. The slights and insults that this stoic mother and son must endure over race and sexuality are tellingly detailed. And these build to an ending which is surprising and shocking, and yet one that is very finely judged when you consider what has come before."
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
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
Hollinghurst proves once more to be a master of emotive prose. It’s a tour de force ― Publishers Weekly
Luxuriously immersive, subtle and elegiac, [Our Evenings] traces the arc of a life to paint a picture of modern Britain and is shot through with love, longing and delicious comedy ― The Bookseller
Moments of extraordinary beauty and set pieces as powerful as anything Hollinghurst has written ― The New Yorker