Our Evenings
The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller from a Booker Prize-winning Author
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4.4 • 33 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker winner Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty) traces the divisions of post-Brexit London in this elegant tale of two men's divergent paths across decades. Dave Win, an aging gay actor, fondly remembers Mark Hadlow, the philanthropist who sponsored his education, after Mark's death at 94. Hadlow funded Dave's boarding school scholarship in the 1960s, where Dave was classmates with Mark's bully son, Giles, now a leading Brexiteer whose own mother calls him an "authoritarian." In what proves to be a brilliant stroke of misdirection, Hollinghurst suggests in the opening pages that the novel will be Giles's. Instead, Dave takes center stage, devoting the bulk of his narration to a life well lived, despite homophobic intimidation at school and the racial prejudice he faced during his career, which often saw him typecast in servant roles (he's half Burmese). He recounts the loving relationship he has with his single mother, Avril, a dressmaker; his success in the theater; and joyful romantic relationships. Neither he nor the reader ever learns the details of Avril's brief liaison with Dave's biological father in Burma after WWII, but its mystery charges the pages with melancholic intensity, as do the prejudices Dave faces throughout his life, which define his fate in the wrenching conclusion, when Giles's vision of the world plays a decisive part. Hollinghurst proves once more to be a master of emotive prose. It's a tour de force.
Customer Reviews
Hugely enjoyable and impressive
I think this could be his best yet…..