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.

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, 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

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels, 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.