Our Evenings

A 'Book of the Year' for The Guardian, The Observer, The Times, Daily Express, The Spectator, The Financial Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and the I Featured on Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime' '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, 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 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, and of 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. Review: 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 * 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 * A moving novel, written with beautiful poise and a wonderful grasp of life's detail that singles Hollinghurst's voice out. He writes of male concerns and love with true subtlety and feeling * Big Issue * Our Evenings cements Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain's best novelists . . . Written in sentences that are often arch and always effortless, it's a remarkable, richly humane novel * i news * Our Evenings is a work of such expansive, affecting brilliance and is a must for the Booker Prize next year . . . There is richness aplenty on these pages: acute social comedy, potent set pieces, some mesmerisingly beautiful distillations of atmosphere and emotion. It's all woven masterfully into an intimate first-person meditation on modern England . . . A work of such expansive, affecting brilliance * Daily Mail * Our Evenings belongs to the long, rich tradition of personal progresses, by turns drolly self-mocking, theatrically self-posturing, mischievously randy and at the end touchingly vulnerable. Along the way the pages often light up with brilliantly observed scene-setting . . . I'm not sure any living writer is quite as good as taking you there so immersively that you take in the feel of things, along with the play of all the other senses. And at his best Hollinghurst is almost Austenian in his eye for social comedy * The Financial Times * Alan Hollinghurst is the voice of a generation * The Times * Alan Hollinghurst just can't write a sentence that isn't beautiful. Am still haunted by the atmospherically glimmering melancholy and elegant wit of Our Evenings, long after finishing it * Nigella Lawson * Hollinghurst remains an English stylist without obvious living equal. He simply does not make mistakes * The Times * Languorous, elegant . . . Our Evenings is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man's personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language * The New York Times * One of the English language's finest novelists . . . Our Evenings gains momentum as it goes on, flowering finally into something sadly beautiful - a meditation on growing old, the mutability of relationships, and the fragility of social progress, framed by the world-on-fire mood of the present . . . Hollinghurst writes so well about intimacy because he understands how it can surprise us * New York Magazine * Affecting. Mr. Hollinghurst's acute descriptive powers are unleashed . . . One of Mr. Hollinghurst's more tender, understated novels. One of the best novelists at work today * Wall Street Journal * Hollinghurst doesn't hesitate to linger over scenes of exquisite sensory detail and complex social ritual - the lift of a brow, the inflection of a voice. This lends the book a richness and subtlety that sets it apart from most contemporary fiction * Vulture * Such passages of precise and perceptive social dissection are what the Hollinghurst fan lives for * Slate * Hollinghurst's cultural range-as his new novel, Our Evenings, again confirms-is enormous * The Atlantic * A profoundly moving novel, packed with feeling and insight. ... By the end of the book, the reader will feel bereft of Dave's company, like an old friend has moved on. With Our Evenings, Hollinghurst has captured the essence of a life, of all life, as a long day's journey into night * Irish Times * Our Evenings is a novel about acceptance: of time's passage, of life's limitations, of the small victories that make existence meaningful. Hollinghurst has aged alongside his characters, and his prose has aged with him. What emerges is a work of quiet power, a novel that finds its emotional weight not in dramatic confrontations but in the slow, steady accumulation of a life, with all its beauty and sadness, moments that slip away largely unnoticed, until we are left, like Dave, to reckon with the twilight of our own evenings, looking back on bright mornings * The Observer * Funny and deeply moving, this could be Hollinghurst's best novel yet * Evening Standard * Our Evenings belongs to the long, rich tradition of personal progresses, by turns drolly self-mocking, theatrically self-posturing, mischievously randy and at the end touchingly vulnerable. Along the way the pages often light up with brilliantly observed scene-setting . . . I'm not sure any living writer is quite as good as taking you there so immersively that you take in the feel of things, along with the play of all the other senses. And at his best Hollinghurst is almost Austenian in his eye for social comedy * Financial Times * Alan Hollinghurst is, arguably, the best ever chronicler of the English home counties, and he's at his best here, describing the class system, the political arena, and those nuances of snobbery, homophobia, and racism . . . This is a novel to read slowly and to savour. Hollinghurst's writing and characterisation are simply sublime - but it's his insights and empathy that make this novel so special * Irish Examiner * There's a Victorian spaciousness to this plangent coming-of-age novel that spans half a century. ... Sentence for sentence, Hollinghurst's prose is polished, as ever * Mail on Sunday * Deftly written, sharply observed and laced with dark humour, Our Evenings is a story of how it feels to search for security in a society which rejects you * Daily Mirror * Sumptuous enough to sink into, a heady, immersive literary pleasure that covers 50 years... A state of the nation novel that tackles race, class and sexuality * The Herald * Hollinghurst's most intimate novel yet, but also his most political. While his work has always focused on the differences brought about by class and sexuality, Our Evenings interrogates the influences of race, prejudice, privilege and violence on a person's life. That they sit so easily alongside incisive meditations on grief, love and art are testament to his immense power as a writer * GQ * I must confess my devotion immediately: I read every word this man writes. I wait for every new novel and the wait has been worth it: this is gorgeous. I simply love the way this man writes * Russell T. Davies * Author Biography: Alan Hollinghurst is the author of several novels, including The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger's Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.