Britain's best lines - This is pure pleasure to read

Hollinghurst's mastery is to come at our times with an oblique but cutting angle

- ETHAN CROFT

Our Evenings - Alan Hollinghurst

This is both a Brexit book and, to some extent, a Covid book. Those subjects are hard to get right without being unfashionably earnest and overly contemporary (good writers like Jonathan Coe have stumbled). Yet Our Evenings manages, extraordinarily, to be unrubbish. Even great.

It follows a talented but not very famous actor, Dave Win, whose life in late 20th- and early 21st-century Britain is largely framed by three facts: his Burmese heritage, his scholarship at a public school, and his homosexuality. The title is nicked from an old actors’ phrase: “Our evenings are not our own.”

What, you might ask, does a bildungsroman about a character actor have to do with Brexit or Covid, or any other epoch-defining event? The answer is to trust in the boundless talents of Alan Hollinghurst.