The Sparsholt Affair

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What to expect

'Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst' — Esquire

From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the complex relationships of a remarkable family.

In October 1940, the handsome young David Sparsholt arrives in Oxford. A keen athlete and oarsman, he at first seems unaware of the effect he has on others – particularly on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist and destined to become a writer himself. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: an ephemeral, uncertain place, in which nightly blackouts conceal secret liaisons. Over the course of one momentous term, David and Evert forge an unlikely friendship that will colour their lives for decades to come . . .

Alan Hollinghurst’s sweeping novel evokes the intimate relationships of a group of friends bound together by art, literature and love across three generations. It explores the social and sexual revolutions of the most pivotal years of the past century, whose life-changing consequences are still being played out to this day. Richly observed, disarmingly witty and emotionally charged, The Sparsholt Affair is an unmissable achievement from one of our finest writers.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

'Startling, radical, embedded in tradition but entirely new' - Guardian

'A master storyteller' - John Banville

Critics Review

Hollinghurst is a master storyteller ... thrilling in the rather awful way that the best Victorian novels are, so that one finds oneself galloping somewhat shamefacedly through the pages in order to discover what happens next.
John Banville
Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving.
Evening Standard
Dazzlingly good: the best new novel I’ve read this year. Once again, Hollinghurst is both utterly sumptuous and utterly precise
Spectator
Mr. Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror.
The New York Observer
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair is startling, radical, embedded in tradition but entirely new in final effect – the novel that other novelists were all talking about this year.
Guardian
A sweeping and intimate masterpiece, full of sensual pleasures and observational wisdom
Guardian
Thrillingly stylish and gripping
Guardian
But for narrative ambition and sheer comic joy, by far the best thing I’ve read this year . . . A novel with brains and heart and balls — the kind you find yourself wanting to read at two speeds at once: very quickly, so that you can get on to the next page, and very slowly, so that you can linger over each beautifully crafted sentence. He’s a writer who makes every word sing
Spectator
Audacious, ambitious . . . an absorbingly complex novel reaching across seven decades . . . Hollinghurst's prose delights
The Times, Saturday Review
Beautiful; moving . . . he writes with subtlety and sympathy; wisdom and understanding
New York Times
A highlight of Hollinghurst’s career, and one of the best books of the year . . . a true master
Independent
My favourite living novelist
Guardian
Richly textured and alive with ironic wit . . . An ambitious novel of family, sexuality and art
The Sunday Times
Captures the changing nature of the homosexual experience as the country moves from shame and criminality to openness [and] dating apps
The Times
Alluring, virtuosic, cinematic . . . The traditional novel form seems as pleasurable and humanly true as ever in his hands
New Yorker
Deeply pleasurable . . . written with poise, lucidity and pathos
Harper's
A wonder, full of wit and tenderness . . . there is no better stylist alive [than] Hollinghurst
Slate
Perhaps Hollinghurst’s most beautiful novel yet—a book full of glorious sentences by the greatest prose stylist writing in English today . . . An unashamedly readable novel, undoubtedly the work of a master
The Observer
It’s not often that readers see such a fundamental rethinking of what fiction can do, and rarer still that the result is such a joy
Spectator
The immense assurance of the writing, the deep knowledge of the settings and periods in which the story unfolds, the mingling of cruel humour and lyrical tenderness, the insatiable interest in human desire from its most refined to its most brutally carnal, grip you as tightly as any thriller
The Guardian
A novelist with a particular genius for inhabiting the past [and] an extraordinary gift for the condensing and enriching detail . . . Ravishing
LRB
Breathtaking . . . the novel chronicles a handful of queer friendships–the way they bent and twisted and sometimes even shattered, the reverberations of each affecting generation after generation of queer people who came after them
Lit Hub

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