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FEBRUARY SELECTION: Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
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, challenges, and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’ envy and violence. As the book unfolds over half a century, the two boys’ careers 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 that transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security. 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 one of the finest writers of our age.
Our Evenings will be discussed at the next meeting of the Book Discussion Group, to be held on Saturday, February 28, from 11:00 AM to noon at the Stonewall Library, 1300 E. Sunrise Blvd. Fort Lauderdale and simultaneously on Zoom. (Meeting ID: 275 139 4844 and Passcode: 076609)
