Our Evenings

A standing ovation for Our Evenings!

Richard E. Grant, actor and star of Withnail and I and Saltburn

Our Evenings is marked by a sharp eye, a tender sensibility, and an unflagging wit. I never wanted it to end.

Emma Donoghue

A deeply moving novel, sensitive and hilarious in equal measure. A marvel I would recommend to anyone

Paterson Joseph, actor and star of Peep Show and Noughts and Crosses

This sublime novel – classic Hollinghurst in everything but point of view – could not be timelier

Mendez, author of Rainbow Milk

Hollinghurst proves once more to be a master of emotive prose. It’s a tour de force

Publishers Weekly

Luxuriously immersive, subtle and elegiac, [Our Evenings] traces the arc of a life to paint a picture of modern Britain and is shot through with love, longing and delicious comedy

The Bookseller

Moments of extraordinary beauty and set pieces as powerful as anything Hollinghurst has written

The New Yorker

A moving novel, written with beautiful poise and a wonderful grasp of life’s detail that singles Hollinghurst’s voice out. He writes of male concerns and love with true subtlety and feeling

Big Issue

Our Evenings cements Alan Hollinghurst as one of Britain’s best novelists . . . Written in sentences that are often arch and always effortless, it’s a remarkable, richly humane novel

i news

Our Evenings is a work of such expansive, affecting brilliance and is a must for the Booker Prize next year . . . There is richness aplenty on these pages: acute social comedy, potent set pieces, some mesmerisingly beautiful distillations of atmosphere and emotion. It’s all woven masterfully into an intimate first-person meditation on modern England . . . A work of such expansive, affecting brilliance

Daily Mail

Our Evenings belongs to the long, rich tradition of personal progresses, by turns drolly self-mocking, theatrically self-posturing, mischievously randy and at the end touchingly vulnerable. Along the way the pages often light up with brilliantly observed scene-setting . . . I’m not sure any living writer is quite as good as taking you there so immersively that you take in the feel of things, along with the play of all the other senses. And at his best Hollinghurst is almost Austenian in his eye for social comedy

The Financial Times

Alan Hollinghurst is the voice of a generation

The Times

Alan Hollinghurst just can’t write a sentence that isn’t beautiful. Am still haunted by the atmospherically glimmering melancholy and elegant wit of Our Evenings, long after finishing it

Nigella Lawson

Hollinghurst remains an English stylist without obvious living equal. He simply does not make mistakes

The Times

Languorous, elegant . . . Our Evenings is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language

The New York Times

One of the English language’s finest novelists . . . Our Evenings gains momentum as it goes on, flowering finally into something sadly beautiful — a meditation on growing old, the mutability of relationships, and the fragility of social progress, framed by the world-on-fire mood of the present . . . Hollinghurst writes so well about intimacy because he understands how it can surprise us

New York Magazine

Affecting. Mr. Hollinghurst’s acute descriptive powers are unleashed . . . One of Mr. Hollinghurst’s more tender, understated novels. One of the best novelists at work today

Wall Street Journal

Hollinghurst doesn’t hesitate to linger over scenes of exquisite sensory detail and complex social ritual — the lift of a brow, the inflection of a voice. This lends the book a richness and subtlety that sets it apart from most contemporary fiction

Vulture

Such passages of precise and perceptive social dissection are what the Hollinghurst fan lives for

Slate

Hollinghurst’s cultural range—as his new novel, Our Evenings, again confirms—is enormous

The Atlantic

A profoundly moving novel, packed with feeling and insight. … By the end of the book, the reader will feel bereft of Dave’s company, like an old friend has moved on. With Our Evenings, Hollinghurst has captured the essence of a life, of all life, as a long day’s journey into night

Irish Times

Our Evenings is a novel about acceptance: of time’s passage, of life’s limitations, of the small victories that make existence meaningful. Hollinghurst has aged alongside his characters, and his prose has aged with him. What emerges is a work of quiet power, a novel that finds its emotional weight not in dramatic confrontations but in the slow, steady accumulation of a life, with all its beauty and sadness, moments that slip away largely unnoticed, until we are left, like Dave, to reckon with the twilight of our own evenings, looking back on bright mornings

The Observer

Funny and deeply moving, this could be Hollinghurst’s best novel yet

Evening Standard

Our Evenings belongs to the long, rich tradition of personal progresses, by turns drolly self-mocking, theatrically self-posturing, mischievously randy and at the end touchingly vulnerable. Along the way the pages often light up with brilliantly observed scene-setting . . . I’m not sure any living writer is quite as good as taking you there so immersively that you take in the feel of things, along with the play of all the other senses. And at his best Hollinghurst is almost Austenian in his eye for social comedy

Financial Times

Alan Hollinghurst is, arguably, the best ever chronicler of the English home counties, and he’s at his best here, describing the class system, the political arena, and those nuances of snobbery, homophobia, and racism . . . This is a novel to read slowly and to savour. Hollinghurst’s writing and characterisation are simply sublime — but it’s his insights and empathy that make this novel so special

Irish Examiner

There’s a Victorian spaciousness to this plangent coming-of-age novel that spans half a century. … Sentence for sentence, Hollinghurst’s prose is polished, as ever

Mail on Sunday

Deftly written, sharply observed and laced with dark humour, Our Evenings is a story of how it feels to search for security in a society which rejects you

Daily Mirror

Sumptuous enough to sink into, a heady, immersive literary pleasure that covers 50 years… A state of the nation novel that tackles race, class and sexuality

The Herald

Hollinghurst’s most intimate novel yet, but also his most political. While his work has always focused on the differences brought about by class and sexuality, Our Evenings interrogates the influences of race, prejudice, privilege and violence on a person’s life. That they sit so easily alongside incisive meditations on grief, love and art are testament to his immense power as a writer

GQ

I must confess my devotion immediately: I read every word this man writes. I wait for every new novel and the wait has been worth it: this is gorgeous. I simply love the way this man writes

Russell T. Davies