Our Evenings – Hollinghurst Alan (2024)

Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thinking it healthier not to, though I had lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice. Dave Win is thirteen when he first visits the Hadlows, sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school, where their son Giles is his contemporary. For Dave, this weekend, with its games, challenges, and surprising encounters, opens up exciting new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’s envy and violence. Over half a century, the boys’ lives diverge dramatically: Dave becomes a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, while Giles grows into 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, his time on the road with an experimental theatre company, and a late-life affair that transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security. It is also the moving story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home. Dark and luminous, poignant and wickedly funny, Alan Hollinghurst’s novel portrays modern England through 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. The contents are in English.