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

With echoes of The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst’s themes of class and sexuality are given a fresh take in this, another beautifully written novel. Unfortunately the writing does go on a bit at times, and as with Swimming-Pool, I did struggle to stay focused, but maybe Hollinghurst simply isn’t a writer for me. If you’re an old fan, I would definitely recommend!

An interesting tale about a young man who finds himself “on the outside” due to his sexuality and unusual background. The characters are vividly drawn and his thoughts about them and his life compelling.
An unusual storyline

Our Evenings leaves no such doubts. This is the story of Dave Win as he tells it himself, in late middle age, recreating with glowing intensity a sequence of formative or quietly significant episodes across six decades, from the 1960s to the pandemic. He is a boy at school, discovering the possibilities of music and drama, finding his own powers, shaken by encounters with prejudice and aggression, filled with unspoken ecstasies as his sensual attraction to men grows. He is a young actor with a subversive touring company in the 1970s; he is a lover, finding joy with his partners. He is an only son to a single mother, their closeness outlasting all change.

Our Evenings takes the form of a memoir by Dave Win, an actor in his sixties, looking back on his life and his relationship with the wealthy Hadlow family, as he learns of Mark Hadlow’s death.

Dave is a boy from a lower-middle-class background, brought up by his (apparently) widowed British mother after the death of his Burmese father. He is awarded a scholarship to board at a minor public school by the Hadlow family trust. He spends a formative summer holiday with them. Mark is the father. Giles, the son, is an unpleasant bully who also attends the school and is a couple of years older than Dave.

Dave is conscious of the many ways he is an outsider. However, he eventually finds popularity and safety at school through his talent for mimicry and goes on to become an actor. His narration takes us through his life, from school to his career to his romantic relationships.

The most touching parts of Our Evenings are perhaps in Dave's relationship with his mother. She is resourceful and loving and they have a close relationship. However, she tells him little about his father or the time she spent in Burma and much is unspoken between them. That tension between intimacy and secrecy is a recurring theme in the novel.

Despite the framing of the novel, the Hadlows play a relatively small part in the narrative. There is no cathartic confrontation with Giles, who by the time of his father's death is a fairly unpleasant Brexiteer MP. Instead the Hadlows appear at key moments, almost in the background, their wealth and influence unobtrusively changing lives for good or ill. It is one of the subtle ways Hollinghurst powerfully – and at times disturbingly – shows the interaction of the personal and the political in Dave’s life.

Our Evenings is atmospheric and immersive with lovely observations and Dave’s understated humour running through it. Its broad sweep evokes the different periods of recent history and gives it the feel of a nineteenth-century novel. The familiar Hollinghurst themes of class, sexuality, outsiderness and privilege are given new life.
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Copy from NetGalley.

Hollinghurst has delivered a well-paced and beautifully realised narrative of the life of his main character, David.

He employs his signature style - eloquent and elegantly flowing sentences - to describe architecture, nature and art with the same care as he takes over people.

We grow with David, a gay mixed race boy, raised by his mother; seeing the world as it changes over 60 years from his perspective.

His world is deeply intertwined with, and influenced by, another family whose various members play the roles of benefactors and David's antithesis.

It is well paced, and has pleasing echoes of some of the author's other work - it's always nice to recognise a character trait or opinion expressed elsewhere!

An excellent story of how someone and their world changes from the 1960s to the 2020s.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy.

Quintessentially British coming of age of a gay, biracial boy chasing happiness. Descriptive and melancholy, just a bit too long.

I’m sad to say that I just couldn’t get on with this book. I struggled to immerse myself in more than a few pages at a time - the fact that I can’t really put my finger on why shows that it is definitely a case of this just not being a book for me.
The story is sweeping, has comedy and tragedy, and the characters are thoughtfully written so, as you would expect from such a talented writer, there is nothing to grasp at to explain why I didn’t really connect with it. It will most definitely have its audience of people who love it, I sadly wasn’t one of them