Alan Hollinghurst In Conversation With Hongwei Bao

 We are thrilled to welcome Alan Hollinghurst to Waterstones Nottingham to celebrate the paperback release of his latest novel, Our Evenings. Alan will be in conversation with Hongwei Bao.

 

Our Evenings guarantees sheer reading joy – a tender and sometimes angry portrait of Britain over the past half-century, totally immersive but so intimate that you will barely notice its quasi-epic scale.’ Tash Aw, The Observer

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, very movingly, the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.

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 the finest writer of our age.

Alan and Hongwei will discuss the book before an audience Q&A and book signing.

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 2004Man Booker Prize), The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair. He wasawarded a knighthood in the 2025 New Year’s Honours list for services to literature. Alan Hollinghurst lives in London.

 Dr Hongwei Bao is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism (Routledge) and Queering the Asian Diaspora (Sage). He also co-edited Queer Literature in the Sinosphere (Bloomsbury). His poetry collections include The Passion of the Rabbit God (Valley Press) and Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed Press).

For any queries or accessibility requirements, please contact events.nottingham@waterstones.com