The Sparsholt Affair

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