Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, brings us a dark, luminous and wickedly funny 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 the flames of gutter and dwindle pleading for a snuffer. The author’s own life spanning from 1960s boarding school to the scoundrel times of just yesterday, graphic explanations of cosiness battles with lust  amid dimming of the daylight. 

Our Evenings chronicling the coming of age of Dave/David Win, the product of a brief, postwar affair, between his mother Avril, a secretary at the British Embassy in Rangoon, and a Burmese official, making the writer a double-outsider in the deeply English world in which he grows up.

Dave Win sis thirteen years old when he first goes to stay with the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school. This weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to their son Giles’ envy and violence.

As their lives unfold over the next half a century, the two boys’ careers will diverge dramatically: Dave, a gifted actor struggling with convention and discrimination, Giles an increasingly powerful and dangerous politician.

Along the way the pages often light up with brilliantly observed scene-setting, In the loo of a country house where Dave, an “Exhibitioner” scholarship boy at a minor public school, is staying as a guest of a bullying class-mate’s parents. “There was a basket on the floor with copies of The Field  and Berkshire Life, the glossy paper weirdly softened by damp at he bottom of the pile  the damp had gone further and fused the pages in s stiff swollen wad, which creaked and scrunched when I bent it”. 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 inches eye for social comedy.  In a hotel at Friscombe Sands where his mother’s lesbian love interest  had taken them for a seaside holiday,  the waitress Maureen makes “a dozen shy journeys from the sideboard to the tables, each time bearing a single item  – a fish knife, a forgotten napkin, a pat of butter….

The wait for the starter felt the longest measured out by Maurren’s well-meaning walk back and forth across the room and questions about who was having the soup”.

At a posh party Dave sees the school bully, already a rising political star of the wrong sort,  “ nod and smile at someone – not as a prelude to joining them but as a sign he wasn’t going to”. What makes the rich art patron who begins and all but ends the book such an heroic model for Dave other than standing in for The Father He Never Had. His son, the school bully, predictably becomes a Brexiter rotter whose philistinism is not only no bar, but an asset to his ascent to Minister of the Arts.

Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his life as schoolboy and student, his first love affairs, in London, and on the road with an experimental theatre company, and of a late-life affair, which transforms his sixties with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador £22/ Random House $30, 496 pages