Our Evenings

By: Alan Hollinghurst

Narrated by: Prasanna Puwanarajah

Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

'The best novel that’s been written about contemporary Britain in the past ten years. It’s funny but desperately moving too' – The Sunday Times

Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny 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.

Dave Win is thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.

As their lives unfold over the next 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 the intimate and touching story of Dave Win’s 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.

Our Evenings entered the Sunday Times Fiction Hardback chart at #9 w/b 07-10-24.

©2024 Alan Hollinghurst (P)2024 Macmillan Publishers International Limited

Critic reviews

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 in a genteel English Home Counties setting. It is the story of a country undergoing great change, even if its people aren’t aware of it—the novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end (Tash Aw)

A standing ovation for Our Evenings! (Richard E. Grant, actor and star of Withnail and I and Saltburn)

Our Evenings is marked by a sharp eye, a tender sensibility, and an unflagging wit. I never wanted it to end. (Emma Donoghue)

A deeply moving novel, sensitive and hilarious in equal measure. A marvel I would recommend to anyone (Paterson Joseph, actor and star of Peep Show and Noughts and Crosses)

This sublime novel – classic Hollinghurst in everything but point of view – could not be timelier (Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk )

A very credible story beautifully read and interpreted

It felt very much a credible biography and commentary on life in the 1950s with all the historical nuances of prejudice both racial and gay.