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Buy Our Evenings By Alan Hollinghurst online from Woodbine Books – free delivery in ROI on orders over €50
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.
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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
