Our Evenings

Fans of the great author Alan Hollinghurst (The Stranger's Child) will be delighted by Our Evenings, an elegant, episodic novel that spans half a century in the life of a gay, biracial British stage actor. The actor is David Win, the only child of a single mother. His father, whom David didn't know, was a Burmese man his mother met while working as a typist after World War II. At the start of the novel, David is in bed with his husband, Richard, when he learns upsetting news: Mark Hadlow, a wealthy businessman who, in the early 1960s, sponsored a scholarship for David to attend the elite Bampton school, has died at 94. That scholarship paved David's way to Oxford. It also introduced him to Mark's son, Giles, who would grow up to become a pro-Brexit right-winger, "one of our leading Eurosceptics."

Their lives intersect thereafter while also diverging wildly, with David becoming an actor of moderate renown. He remains close to his mother, a dressmaker, who enters into a business relationship, and more, with a divorcée named Esme Croft. The bulk of this graceful work dramatizes the peaks and valleys of David's life, including career successes and setbacks and his romantic partners--relations that, for a gay, dark-skinned man in Britain, raise more than a few eyebrows. The influence of Henry James on Hollinghurst's work is as pronounced as ever; he even winkingly slips in a Jamesian "hang fire." The edgy refinement of all of Hollinghurst's work is very much in evidence in this excellent book. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

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