Synopsis "Our Evenings: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller"
'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 is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the Hadlows, the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school where their son Giles is his contemporary. For Dave this weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’s envy and violence. As Our Evenings unfolds over 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; but it is also, very movingly, the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.
Both dark and luminous, poignant and wickedly funny, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel gives us a 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 the finest writer of our age.
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
Our Evenings is 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. It is the story of a country undergoing great change, even if its people aren’t aware of it—the novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end - Tash Aw
A standing ovation for Our Evenings! - Richard E. Grant, actor and star of Withnail and I and Saltburn
Our Evenings is marked by a sharp eye, a tender sensibility, and an unflagging wit. I never wanted it to end. - Emma Donoghue
A deeply moving novel, sensitive and hilarious in equal measure. A marvel I would recommend to anyone - Paterson Joseph, actor and star of Peep Show and Noughts and Crosses
This sublime novel – classic Hollinghurst in everything but point of view – could not be timelier - Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk
Hollinghurst proves once more to be a master of emotive prose. It’s a tour de force - Publishers Weekly
