Our Evenings is a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.

Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theatre company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.

Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

Available from Knopf Canada/Penguin Random House. Read an excerpt.

Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library; The Folding Star; The Spell; The Line of Beauty, winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Stranger’s Child. He has also received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London.

About the Author

Bryen Dunn is a freelance journalist based in Toronto with a focus on tourism, lifestyle, entertainment and community issues. He has written several travel articles and has an extensive portfolio of celebrity interviews with musicians, actors and other public personalities. He’s willing to take on any assignments of interest, attend parties with free booze, listen to rants, and travel the world in search of the great unknown. He’s eager to discover the new, remember the past, and look into the future.