From Oxford during the dark days of the Second world war to contemporary London, this is a masterly novel about sexuality, art and family secrets.
From Oxford during the dark days of the Second world war to contemporary London, this is a masterly novel about sexuality, art and family secrets.
PRODUCT INFORMATION
Summary
From Oxford during the dark days of the Second world war to contemporary London, this is a masterly novel about sexuality, art and family secrets.
From Oxford during the dark days of the Second world war to contemporary London, this is a masterly novel about sexuality, art and family secrets.
Description
The long-awaited sixth novel from the supreme stylist of British fiction and previous winner of the Man Booker Prize.
"Perhaps Hollinghurst's most beautiful novel yet - a book full of glorious sentences by the greatest prose stylist writing in English today." Observer
In 1940, Evert Dax and David Sparsholt, two young men from very different backgrounds, meet at Oxford University. Dax is a second year student reading English, coming from a rackety upper middle class background; Sparsholt is from a humbler Midlands community and is reading engineering, a young man whose good looks and fine figure have proved highly attractive to his peers.
This time is a unique one in the history of the university: with military call-up at twenty, soon brought forward to nineteen, almost all students come up to Oxford knowing that they will only have a year or so of study. A sense of futility is mixed with one of recklessness. All life after dusk is lived under black-out, encouraging and covering what would normally be impossible liaisons. What happens to these two men in this year will affect many lives and will set in motion the mystery at the heart of The Sparsholt Affair.
Alan Hollinghurst's masterly novel takes us through several generations and across key periods of uncertainty and change in British society. From the darkest days of the Second World War, it moves to the changing world of the a socially and sexually liberated London of the 1960s, before landing in the mid-1970s, with the three-day week, fuel shortages and power cuts. The reverberations continue through the next generation in the 1990s before reaching a conclusion in the present decade, a world of new media and new ideas.
PRAISE FOR HOLLINGHURST
"Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today." Guardian
"Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's." Spectator
"Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving." Evening Standard
Awards
Long-listed for International Dublin Literary Award 2019 (UK)
Critic Reviews
Mr. Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror. The New York Observer Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's Spectator Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving. Evening Standard Hollinghurst is a master storyteller ... thrilling in the rather awful way that the best Victorian novels are, so that one finds oneself galloping somewhat shamefacedly through the pages in order to discover what happens next. -- John Banville
About the Author
Alan Hollinghurst is the author of several novels including The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell,The Line of Beauty and The Stranger's Child. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the 2004 Man Booker Prize. He lives in London.
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