
Synopsis
'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
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 from 1962 to the present day. 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.
Our Evenings entered the Sunday Times Fiction Hardback chart at #9 w/b 07-10-24.
Details
Reviews
The best novel that’s been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It’s funny but desperately moving tooThe Sunday Times
The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our timeThe 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 pageThe 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 endTash Aw, Booker Prize-nominated author of The South