Our Evenings
by Alan Hollinghurst· 2024
Spanning half a century, Our Evenings traces the journey of Dave Win from boarding school childhood to an artistic flourishing in experimental theatre, against the backdrop of an ever-changing Britain.
'Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.'
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 the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.
Alan Hollinghurst’s novel gives us a portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence.
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Spanning half a century, Our Evenings traces the journey of Dave Win from boarding school childhood to an artistic flourishing in experimental theatre, against the backdrop of an ever-changing Britain. 'Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.' 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 the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home. Alan Hollinghurst’s novel gives us a portrait of modern England through the lens of one man’s experience. It is a story of race and class, theatre and sexuality, love and the cruel shock of violence.