Alan Hollinghurst: an exclusive extract from his new novel Our Evenings

Alan Hollinghurst: an exclusive extract from his new novel Our Evenings

The Booker prize-winning author introduces an excerpt from his latest book – a story of race and class, love and sexuality

In this extract from early in Our Evenings, the narrator Dave Win recalls a seaside holiday in the summer of 1962, when he was 14 years old. Dave and his mother, Avril, a dressmaker, live in a small Berkshire market town, and in previous summers they have always gone for a miserable week in Clevedon with his aunt and uncle; but this year they have been taken up by Avril’s new customer, the forceful Mrs Esme Croft, who has swept them off for 10 days in the north Devon resort of Friscombe.

Dave has never met his father, a Burmese official with whom his mother had a brief affair when she worked as a secretary to the British governor in Rangoon in 1947. The onset of puberty has coincided with his winning a scholarship to a small local public school, where for the first time he is violently bullied for his appearance. A new self-consciousness combines with the hormonal turbulence of his intense feeling for other boys and men.

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