Booker Prize Winner Alan Hollinghurst for Our Evenings
Monday 2nd December 2024
Pilrig St. Paul's Church, 1B Pilrig St, Edinburgh EH6 5AH
7pm
7.30pm
Please note, this is now taking place on Monday 2nd December, 7:30pm at Pilrig St Paul's Church.
We are thrilled to be welcoming Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst to Edinburgh.
Join us to hear more about Alan's latest novel Our Evenings. Our bookseller Duncan Swan describes the novel as 'completely brilliant - a masterpiece.' The novel has been receiving the most extraordinary reviews: Guardian described it as "his finest novel yet," and The Times called Hollinghurst "the best living English novelist."
Tash Aw has commended it as 'a truly astonishing book, 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'.
Our Evenings
Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the Hadlows, the sponsors of his scholarship 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, poignant 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 Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of seven novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty, The Stranger’s Child, The Sparsholt Affair and Our Evenings. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.