Picador will be publishing a new novel by Alan Hollinghurst this autumn, entitled Our Evenings.
Former publisher Paul Baggaley acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Antony Harwood. Mary Mount will now be publishing for Picador, on 3rd October 2024.
The synopsis says: “Dave Win is 13 years old when he first goes to stay with the Hadlows, the sponsors of his scholarship at a local boarding school where their son Giles is his contemporary. For Dave this weekend, with its games and challenges and surprising encounters, will open up heady new possibilities, even as it exposes him to Giles’s envy and violence.
“As Our Evenings unfolds over 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. Our Evenings is Dave Win’s own account of his 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 60s with a new sense of happiness and a perilous security; but it is also, very movingly, the story of his hard-working widowed mother, whose own life takes an unexpected new turn after her son leaves home.”
Picador said: “Both dark and luminous, poignant and wickedly funny, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel gives us a 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.”
Mount said: “Our Evenings is a novel that is both beautifully wrought and deeply engaged with the present from one of the great writers of our times. It is an exhilarating work and I cannot wait to share it with Alan Hollinghurst’s many readers around the world.”
