THE contemporary english prose stylist. like is there another writer operating at a sentence by sentence level like this. don't think so. GORGEOUS!

Hollinghurst is one of those writers who disappears off the radar for about a decade and then comes out with such a brilliant book everyone wonders why he is not more prolific. ‘The Folding Star’ was one of the first gay novels I ever read, along with Edmund White’s ‘A Boy’s Own Story’.

These two writers have bookended my gay reading life ever since; not a bad place to start. And now there is a new crop of bright young things crowding through the doors that these two writers flung open so forcefully in their own ascendancy.

I read ‘The Line of Beauty’ before it won the Booker – I was surprised that such an unapologetically gay (and anti-conservative; liberal is not the correct word) novel won such a prestigious award. May Hollinghurst was, too.

One reviewer – I think it was from The Washington Post, which makes sense as American audiences are notoriously prudish – remarked archly that Hollinghurst’s books should be sold with smelling salts, given the graphic (gay) sexual content.

Reading ‘Our Evenings’ – Hollinghurst’s best book to date, in my opinion – and reflecting on his oeuvre, not even ten books, if I recall, it is remarkable how much his preoccupations have changed, and stayed the same, over the decades.

Female characters take the centre stage for a large chunk, the beautiful story of David’s mother and her lesbian lover who defy the prejudice of the time and carve out a magnificent life together. Yes, the gay son and his mother is an unfortunate trope of the genre, but Hollinghurst adds such grace and melancholy to this defining relationship of David’s life.

You do get a sense of Hollinghurst ticking off the boxes: female characters, check. Race and politics, check. And acting! I can’t recall if Hollinghurst has ever written about theatre life before, but he evokes this bohemian idyll with wit and wonder.

Of course, our protagonist segues from (barely) working actor to threadbare writer, and Hollinghurst has great fun in comparing the deficiencies and pecking orders of both, an experience he has no doubt been subjected every time a new book pops out and he is trundled out by his publisher like a main exhibit in a courtroom drama.

It is also Hollinghurst’s most overtly political book to date. No spoilers, but I was a bit taken aback by the coda. Is it necessary? Then again, a main theme here is memory, and who lives on to remember, and recount, our own stories and those of our friends and loved ones, against the inexorable tide of history, which has a nasty habit of regressing to our base natures. A comment on Brexit: “In a few weeks history went backwards by a century.”

A stickler for detail, I thought Hollinghurst had forgotten about the bloody birdbath in the garden and its cryptic legend of SENSIM SINE SENSU. But it pops up again at exactly the right moment, and we learn the phrase means: “slowly, without sensing it, we grow old.” And that is the best way to enjoy this extraordinarily rich paean to memory and loss: slowly, savoured in the gloaming of our evenings.

This has been my first read of a novel by Alan Hollinghurst and I am so pleased I decided to select this for one of my December reads. Having had a bit of a bumpy reading year, I have found that I have been picking up books reading a few pages before being unable to continue and settle on one. When starting ‘Our Evenings’, I was immediately drawn to the narrator David Win, at this point in the story an elderly semi-famous actor who is visiting an even older figure called Cara. Decades earlier, Cara Hadlow and her husband Mark had provided David with a scholarship that enabled him to attend a top boarding school in turn opening a world that would have been unthinkable to him being from a working class, single parent family.
The novel spans through David’s life as a young boy navigating the perils of boarding school and being dual heritage in 1960s Britain. His mother, Avril, is a dressmaker whilst his Burmese father remains absent throughout the entire novel. Despite David’s curiosity he remains reluctant to discuss his father with his mother in fear of upsetting her. During his time at school David becomes aware of his homosexuality whilst also being the subject of bullying in varying degrees. Sometimes it is flippant and dismissive racism, other times it is overt. A significant proportion of this treatment comes from the Hadlow’s own son Giles who also attends the school where David lives. The two boys grow up alongside each other, yet they are shown to be worlds apart both socially and politically.
Giles intersperses David’s narrative and almost acts as a counter to his views and ideologies. In a scene towards the end of the novel they both attend a book event held in an English stately home. Both have become authors, David’s book on acting and Giles, who has made it quite high within the British government, has written a political tome. They are scheduled at the same time and David’s audience is very sparse whilst Giles wins most of the spectators from this very particular crowd. The scene is quite a humorous one and yet I was struck by Giles’s seeming desire to be away from David. Despite David having grown up with Giles and even staying at the family home when he was young the two men have never been friendly which again seems to suggest or question how much society has really changed over time, how archaic opinions of class and identity remain much to our detriment.
The novel skillfully moves over the years of David’s life and works to Illustrate the cultural and political climate of each time. David eventually becomes an older man, and it is interesting how age and youth become a focus for him and how he gradually becomes estranged from the boy who started school all those years ago. Age finally creeps up on him as it does us all. The cast of characters that come into David’s life are so well drawn and nuanced, I could have happily spent more time reading about them. David’s mother Avril, who during the novel forms a relationship with Esme, who they pretend on the surface is her business partner but who are quite clearly in a romantic relationship together. They try to conceal this from David in the early years but are gradually able to be reveal this with the passage of time. We do not see much of this due to events being from David’s perspective. Like other characters who come and go in David’s life, we only see them during interactions with him. The novel culminates in a way to show us why this is the case and provides the insight and poignancy that makes it unforgettable. It is a beautiful book that explores the intricacies and pathways of a single life lived.
Thank you to NetGalley for my ARC

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Picador for my copy, 4/5

Alan Hollinghurst treads the familiar ground of class and sex in English society with this moving, lyrical and gorgeously told story.

David Win is a half-Burmese scholarship boy at a minor public school and Our Evenings begins with his obligatory visit to his benefactors the Hadlows in the early 60s. His path will cross with their crude bully of a son Giles through the course of his life, as David becomes a renowned actor and Giles a boorish Brexiteer; it will also intersect with the lives of his parents, lefty liberals and patrons of the arts who ‘use their money for nothing but good’. David makes his way from school to Oxford to stage and screen and, in charting the course of his life and loves, Hollinghurst subtly handles gay rights and race relations from the 60s to the pandemic, with the two sides of the Hadlow family almost acting as ciphers for progressive and regressive forces in society.

David’s joy and desire with his lovers is explored unapologetically and deftly but his most significant relationship is with his mother - a steely, loving woman who raised a mixed race child alone in a hostile English village and who went on to carve her own path with her glamorous female partner Esme. This central relationship is not a centre of conflict, lending a truth to the story.

The novel is also an ode to theatre, but the depth to which quotes and plays were referenced felt self-indulgent, as did the pandemic and Brexit references.

Overall, would recommend. Beautifully written book and a character you’ll be sad to leave.

This was my first time reading Alan Hollinghurst and I absolutely adored his writing. When I opened the first chapter and saw that it was going to be a Brexit novel I was a little tentative as I tend not to get into state-of-the-nation novels but in fact much of the story goes back to early life of Dave Win as he navigates being sent to an exclusive boarding school as a scholarship boy and then struggling as an actor through much of the story. This means the main thrust of the narrative takes place in the 1960-80s and is more a meditation on how men are shaped by experiences and how two men, Dave and the future right-wing politician Giles, could grow up in such close proximity and go on such divergent paths. For me the real beauty in the novel went back to the aching longing and uncertainty of first love as an adolescent and the blossoming of Dave and his understanding of the world and the adults around him. And I think that Hollinghurst has that rare talent of just being a beautiful wordsmith above all else. Definitely a novel I will be pressing into everyone’s hands and re-reading again and again.

A deep historical novel on love in all its forms

First, I'll put aside my one disquiet: the main character David Win is biracial, of an unseen, un-looked-for Burmese father and a beloved white mother. Hollinghurst is neither biracial nor Burmese. Some interviews around this book raise the idea of cultural appropriation but don't really address it. In the novel, Hollinghurst himself disengages with Win's Burmese heritage by making him incurious of his unknown father, which is a neat side step, and one of my notes of disquiet about the book. It doesn't feel realistic, and certainly not logical, but then I'm speaking as someone who's British-Chinese and not Alan Hollinghurst, so what do I know?

Besides that disquiet, I thought the novel brilliantly illuminated Dave win's life as a gay jobbing actor throughout the decades, his love for his mother chief among the highlights. Dave win is distanced from almost all the people in his life by being gay or by being not white, but he is still a warm presence throughout, so the ending is all the more shocking and violent, and the tragedy of finally finding an enduring love made all the more poignant. By then, he felt like a real person to me, and so the novel ends on a bittersweet note, that we have travelled with an empathetic and curious man from teenhood to old age, without anything more to be read.

This is like drinking a glass of fine red wine that reveals its flavours the more you drink.

The main character is Dave Win whose mother is British but his (absent) father was Burmese. Avril ,his mum, is a skilled seamstress who has a business in a small country town. Dave is given a scholarship to a public school, sponsored by the Hadlow family and meets their son Giles there.

Giles seems to be a character reminiscent of Boris Johnson in many ways and Dave finds him difficult, but builds up a more positive relationship with his benefactors, Cara and Mark Hadlow .

Meanwhile his loving relationship with his mum develops as a result of her relationship with Esme Dave is taken on a holiday to the seaside and guesses that the relationship between the two women is more than a business one. On the same holiday he begins to explore his own sexuality.

Dave has a burgeoning acting career which is charted . Although there are some time switches the plot itself is more linear than Hollinghurst's last Novel The Sparsholt Affair which I found more "difficult".

Dave himself is an interesting character. he is battling prejudice for racist reasons as well as his sexuality. However I was left wondering if I really liked him?
I think the scene I will most remember is Dave sorting his mother's clothes after her death- very moving. I wasn't so sure about the last chapter and the "conceit" of Dave's memoirs.

A coming of age novel with links to Great Expectations,

I found this slower paced than previous Hollinghurst novels and some sections more involving than others. Nonetheless, it was broadly an enjoyable read and I’d recommend it. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This is a really tender portrait of growing up amid prejudice and discrimination and finding love amid a changing society.
It is beautifully written and engaging.

An insightful novel, a departure from Hollinghursts previous work but for all the best reasons. But still remains brimming with his signature charm and eye for detail.

With a body of work any writer would die for, a new Alan Hollinghurst novel is worth the long seven-year wait. He is, without doubt, the finest writer in the English language, bar none. I make no apologies for saying that; he has long been my favourite author.

'Our Evenings' is a quietly subtle 'state of the nation' book. Following the life of David Win, half-Burmese, half-English, 100% gay, it starts with a nod to 'Brideshead Revisited' and we see David's childhood friendship with Giles Hudson, the son of the man who funded David's scholarship to a posh school. As David grows up and enters the theatre world, the novel explores his relationships, both with his mother and with the various men in his life. And all the while, in the background, the story of Britain (well, England) plays itself out, Racism, sexuality and class underpin many of the events in David's life, and we culminate, of course, with Brexit and the smug victory of none other than Giles Hudson.

But above all, this is a personal book, a story of a life well lived, of the memories we share with others, and those precious moments, our evenings with the ones we love. And all of this is written in prose that just makes you appreciate the English language. Like no other writer, Alan Hollinghurst can write sentences that remove the reader to the realm of wonder. He is a genius, and this novel confirms his place as our greatest writer.

Whether it wins awards and prizes, who knows? It doesn't actually matter. What we have here is the best book of the year, without doubt. Possibly the best book of the last several years. It is a thing of beauty, and anyone who cares about the state of contemporary fiction must read it.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

Our Evenings is a hugely enjoyable and completely immersive novel by Alan Hollinghurst. Some have called it a "state of the nation" novel, and that is part of it, but it is also a deeply personal and intimate account of one man's life, dealing with prejudice, loneliness, love, sex and family. I didn't love the ending, but completely appreciate the direction Hollinghurst took with it. Excellent overall.

There will never be a Hollinghurst I don’t just completely devour and enjoy, if you’re a fan of a good storyline with touching believable characters, there is NO way you will not love this, and all of Hollinghurt’s back catalogue
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A joy to read, thank you so much to the publisher for the early copy!!

We first meet David Win as a thirteen year-old who is being bullied by a fellow schoolboy Giles. David has a Burmese father and although he never met him, he is constantly reminded of his ‘different’ look- which, for an actor, causes some type-casting, to say the least. Hollinghurst writes about this with humour whilst also subtlety commenting on the UK and its attitudes. We follow David over his lifetime with its ups and downs, his relationships and life on the road as part of an experimental theatre company. Hollinghurst has a unique knack of telling a story that is both engaging and deeply emotive. His writing reflects his astute understanding of human relationships with an emotional intelligence that seeps through the pages. The characters are real and for the reader, this is a satisfying journey that is both warm and heart-breaking. A perfect read.

I loved Alan Hollinghurst's first four novels, that strange but perfect mixture of gay raunch and Walter Pater light. Then skipped the next two entirely, the reviews enthusiastic but to my mind suggesting he'd undergone that most dispiriting of transmogrifications, litfic capture (see also: the way I would religiously read Will Self novels, until I absolutely wouldn't). Maybe I was unfair on The Stranger's Child and The Sparsholt Affair, maybe not. But I couldn't altogether tell you why I let that scepticism be overcome when I saw Our Evenings on Netgalley, and nor am I convinced I was wise to do so.

In a sense, the state of the nation ambitions are similar to The Line Of Beauty – but with the crucial difference that that had decades of perspective and letting the dislike of Thatcherism percolate. Here, narrator Dave Win is looking back as far as his schooldays in the middle of last century, but having already established that the journey will bring us back up to the present, or very nearly the present, where Dave's old school bully Giles Hadlow has become a sort of composite Farage/Rees-Mogg/Johnson* in the vanguard of Brexit, much to the despair of his recently deceased father Mark, a patron of the arts whose philanthropy included funding young David's place at school.

Having established where things are headed, it's back to the schooldays, and then through the years until we end a little past where we began. Dave is, of course, gay, but also the son of a Burmese father, meaning he has visible tokens of outsider status to mirror the inner alienation among mostly straight (for boarding school values of the word), white surroundings. And it's not that the casual racism ever rings false, nor the awkward awakenings (older boys watched furtively in changing rooms and beaches, overheard camp on a party line). But they never feel terribly particular, or new, and there are so very, very many of them, Hollinghurst seemingly bent on achieving through the sheer accumulation of standard experiences what he would once have done with a couple of perfectly chosen specifics. In the process, that glorious light has been comprehensively eclipsed; this is a book suffused with the drizzle in the English soul, one that kept reminding me of Andrew Motion's bathetic revelation that in a forlorn attempt to emulate the inspiration of real poets, he would drink Lemsip while well. I kept being reminded of another book in which a gay man in later life, considering the aftermath of a death, looks back over the life that brought him to this point, and the way the world's beliefs have changed over those decades – but where Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers is a true, baggy epic, Our Evenings is simply long, yet somehow painfully constricted at the same time. More than once, it spends far too long building to a revelation which, by the time it arrives, has lost any possible power, but then the central mystery (how could a couple as lovely as the Hadlows produce a shit of a son like Giles?) never really gets addressed; he and his underdeveloped sister, who felt as if she existed purely to emphasise the question, do just seem to have spontaneously gone wrong, a plot as unsatisfactory here as it was in Augustinian theodicy.

As is so often the way with life, or at any rate used to be, Dave's does become more interesting once he gets to university, and unlike many, it retains some of that henceforth. But we're halfway through the book by that point, and it feels perverse (and not in a good way) for a book so preoccupied with the sense of how little time is left to spend its own so unwisely. Yes, as the years march on, and first the older generation then one's own are winnowed, or worse, reduced in themselves, that has an emotional impact; there's a particular horrid brilliance in the various scenes where Dave struggles to place some unprepossessing, unremarkable middle-aged man who turns out to have once been a beautiful boy. But equally, I'm 46, and thus an incredibly easy mark for this stuff. True, that specificity I missed in the first half did make a stuttering return too, as Dave gets involved with allegedly democratic experimental theatre companies in the seventies, or, once we reach this century, is given a bad slot at a surreptitiously right-leaning literary festival. It's also very good at constructing a plausible, sometimes tragicomic career for a talented British actor people can't quite place ethnically. But once you've come to suspect a book of box-ticking, it's very hard to entirely lose that scepticism, and too often Giles pops up again as the butt of a point that's correct without being interesting (austerity is a scam! Tory arts ministers are philistines!). Mostly, I finish the book with some of the same sentiment Dave has at those meetings with old schoolfriends: how did that magnificent young novelist end up like this?

*Although he must have been in Parliament longer than any of them, what with some of the other details we're given, like Thatcher contributing to a festschrift in his honour. Which is not quite impossible – David Davis' dates would just about work – but contributes to the sense of Hollinghurst's rage overwhelming his precision.

Yet another classic from Hollinghurst, who manages to make 'Our Evenings' more surprising and beautiful than I could have expected. A story of a young man traversing social classes and attempting to fit into a world where he doesn't belong could be cliched and overdone, but Hollinghurst has created an astoundingly poignant and touching 'memoir', fitting for a character that was extremely hard to leave behind once I finished the last page.

As a reader, you know you are in safe hands with Alan Hollinghurst. He writes beautifully and effortlessly carries you along.

We meet the central character of this novel, Dave Win, when he is thirteen, the half-Burmese, scholarship boy, sponsored by the wealthy Hadlow family. Dave has a complicated relationship with fellow schoolboy, Giles Hadlow, who grows from a bully into a politician.

This novel follows Dave from an uncertain schoolboy, as he discovers his sexuality, becomes an actor and makes his way through the twentieth century. This covers the Sixties, when homosexuality becomes legal, but still a difficult - if exciting - world for Dave to negotiate. He has a wonderfully touching relationship with his mother and this is one of the most lovely parts of the book and beautifully realised.

If you haven't read Hollinghurst before, you should do so. He is a moving, realistic, author, with the kind of depth that many authors long for.

For me, Hollinghurst sits between Jonathan Coe and Anthony Powell in his state-of-the-nation and sweep-of-history subject matter as well as his clear and slightly distanced language.

Where Sparsholt was about art, this novel is about actors and features another diffident, slight outsider character; this time, the central character, David Win, has a White English mother and a lost, Burmese father; there's also a Black character and through both of their experiences we learn about the intersectionality of being Global Majority People and gay in the 1970s to the present day. I don't recall this diversity in the previous novel I read and it was of course interesting to me. David is othered by his Brown skin and reading as gay, and then he also has his single mum and her friendships to contend with, as well as the class aspects of having won a scholarship to a minor public school.

This scholarship is the major influence on Dave's life, as he meets both Mark Hadlow, the endower of the scholarship and his horrible son, Giles, who starts off an obnoxious school bully and becomes the architect of Brexit, as you do. And Giles is the Widmerpool of this novel, popping up being interviewed behind a hedge as David walks past with a new boyfriend; doing a turn at the school reunion; being the main attraction at a book festival; and at other points.

We get right up into Covid times, so it's a big, sweeping novel, starting almost at the end then going back to childhood, hopping forward by years and decades and taking in experimental anarchic theatre and the life of an actor who is corralled into small parts but manages to make a living. It's beautifully if slightly sparely written, perfectly plotted and done, with little surprises along the way: the work of a master.

Blog review to be published 16 October 2024 https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2024/10/16/book-review-alan-hollinghurst-our-evenings/

Many thanks to the author, @netgalley, and Pan Macmillan for the ARC of Our Evenings, which was released in the UK and Ireland on 3 October. I've been a fan of Hollinghurst's books ever since I read The Swimming Pool Library two decades ago, and this one, an elegaic tale of an actor's memoirs that has a 'state of the nation' feel to it, is probably his very best work.

The novel recounts the life of David Wyn, opening with the summer holiday he spends with the Hadlows, a wealthy family who have endowed a scholarship David has won. Mark and Cara are gracious and generous hosts who wear their extensive philanthropy lightly; unfortunately, their son Giles is a racist bully. The opening might lead to an expectation that the Hadlows will play a larger role in the novel than they perhaps do. Mark and Cara become like found family for David in adult life, but they're definitely there as secondary characters. Giles, meanwhile, flits in and out of the story (as a prominent Tory politician, awareness of him is unavoidable).

The novel is Hollinghurst's most explicitly political. David is half-Burmese, and experiences racism throughout his life, from the derogatory language of the youthful Giles to repeated assumptions that he's an immigrant because he's mixed race. The novel shows how racism mutates over the passage of time: people don't feel comfortable openly insulting David with racist epithets as society moves on, but they feel it's perfectly OK to say that there are too many immigrants in the country. Similarly, Giles' overt racism changes into "intellectual" arguments for leaving the EU. And Hollinghurst shows how popular such arguments are: when David appears at a literary festival at a luxury house, he speaks to a dozen people and gets a free mug. Giles, meanwhile is feted by the owner, a Duke, and speaks to hundreds. There's a sly humour here, too, though – Giles' treatise on leaving has a German name, and David laughs openly when he hears the stupid Giles described as a leading thinker in the Tory party.

There's so much more I could say about this wonderful book. As ever, Hollinghurst manages to capture moments or thoughts that you'll recognise but haven't fully formed, and puts them so precisely and so much more elegantly than anyone else can manage. I also felt that David had more warmth and appeal than any of the author's other narrators, who can sometimes seem a little cold or unsympathetic. It's a slow, luxurious, moving read, perfect for anyone who likes serious literary fiction, and I really hope that you'll consider reading it.

A sublime read. This book flows so well as it takes us through the life of David Winn from scholarship pupil to his final days. It is so beautiffully written with the hero Dave as a very empathetic character. Cast against the changing norms of British society, we encounter racism, homophobia and class discrimination to name just a few. Well worth reading just to meet this rather special individual who we would all aspire to be given the same circumstances