Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

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.
 
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.
 
-----
 
"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 . . . The novel moves through time so beautifully that I felt such a sense of loss at the end" - Tash Aw
 
"The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time" - The Guardian