The first book to be featured on the Sara Cox Radio 2 Book Club is Our Evenings, the long-awaited new novel from Booker Prize winning author Alan Holllinghurst. The book was released on 3 October and Alan’s interview with Sara is on BBC Sounds now.
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Our Evenings
Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the Hadlows, the sponsors of hisscholarship at a local boarding school where their son Giles is his contemporary. For Dave this weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’s envy and violence. As Our Evenings unfolds over 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; but it is also, very movingly,the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.
Both dark and luminous, deeply affecting and wickedly funny, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel gives us a 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.
About the author
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of six previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty (winner of the 2004 Booker Prize), The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair. He lives in London.
Get involved
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