An Evening With Alan Hollinghurst

We are delighted to welcome Alan Hollinghurst to Waterstones Nottingham to celebrate the release of his new novel, Our Evenings. Alan will be in conversation with academic and writer, Dr Hongwei Bao. 

'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, 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 his new novel, answer questions from the audience, and sign books.

 An author with an extraordinary talent for fusing past lives and experiences with contemporary concerns, Alan Hollinghurst is widely regarded as one of Britain’s finest living writers. Born in Stroud, he studied at Oxford and worked for several years on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement before writing his first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library; a closely observed story of gay life in London in the 1980’s.

His best-known work – the 2004 novel The Line of Beauty – won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was later adapted for television. How other works include The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair.

 
Dr Hongwei Bao is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of five non-fiction books including Queering the Asian Diaspora (Sage, 2024), four edited books including Queer Literature in the Sinosphere (Bloomsbury, 2024), and two poetry collections (The Passion of the Rabbit God and Dream of the Orchid Pavillion).