Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings

Time and date

Friday 11 July 2025

8:30 pm

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Our Evenings is the new novel by Booker-prizewinning author Alan Hollinghurst. Both dark and luminous, deeply affecting and wickedly funny, this incredible 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. Join us for one evening when Alan will be in conversation with Sue Leonard

 

‘The finest novel yet from one of the great writers of our time.’ The Guardian

Admission: €20

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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’ 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.

 

‘Probably the best living English novelist. Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel confirms there is no better literary stylist.’ The Times

 

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

 

Alan Hollinghurst jacket

Writer

Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of six previous novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, The Line of Beauty (winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize), The Stranger’s...

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