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From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed experiences
Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.
Dave Win, the son of a a Burmese man he’s never met and a British dressmaker, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.
From “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe), Our Evenings sweeps readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.
Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Hardback Published 15 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."
“Our Eveningsis a truly astonishing novel, by turns delicate and ferocious, radical in the way it explores questions of race, class, sexuality, and origins.”—Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
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