Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

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.

A stunning portrait of modern England from one of Britain’s finest novelists.

About the Author: Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four novels, The Swimming Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and won it in 2004 for The Line of Beauty. He lives in London.

24 Jul 2025
 

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst ISBN 9781447208242