- Hollinghurst, Alan
Our Evenings : A Novel
From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel of modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed experiences
“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.”—Tash Aw, author of Five Star Billionaire
Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates.
Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.
From “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe), Our Evenings sweeps readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.