Alan Hollinghurst, the Booker Prize-winning author of The Line of Beauty, bring us a “Our Evenings”. Gay life in England across the decades, from 1960s to the pandemic captured with glowing intensity through an actor’s memories. 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 on the finest writers of our age.

Dave Win is 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.

Prasanna Puwanarajah narrated in the first person, and that he himself is an actor adds to the depth and delicacy of his portrayal of Dave Win, who also chooses that profession. But it is Dave’s relationship with Mark Hadlow, a wealthy entrepreneur who endows the young boy’s scholarship to the elite Bampton school.

Class and privilege occupy much of the book, as do issues of race and belonging- Dave’s absent, unmet father was Burmese and finding another dimension in Dave’s bond with his mother Avril. Puwanarajah is especially impressive in capturing Hollinghurst’s interest in the great yearning we have for even an imperfect past, the steady rhythm of Dave’s account punctuated by pauses and momentary catches in the voice that convey semi-buried emotion.

Our Evenings, is a delicate, ferocious radical in the way it explores questions of race, class, sexuality and origins in a genteel English Home counties setting and is Dave Win’s own account of life as a 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