Readers, it’s that time of year: 2024 is coming to a close and 2025 is peeking around the corner. If you are in certain parts of the United States, winter is descending, which means short days, long nights and cold weather.
I don’t know about you, but this twilight period is one of my favorite times of year. The anticipation of, and early steps into, the new year brings optimism and ambition, and the seasonal chill means I want to spend more time hibernating with a good book.
If you are also looking for a good book to kick off the year, you’re in luck.
This January, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Our Evenings,” by Alan Hollinghurst.
The novel, which was one of the Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2024, is a sweeping tale that follows a gay English Burmese actor as he confronts confusing relationships, his emerging sexuality, racism and England’s changing political climate in the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s the story of a life — beautifully told by a literary master (Hollinghurst’s 2004 novel, “The Line of Beauty,” won the Booker Prize and was recently named one of The New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century) who, over the course of his 30-year career, has helped pave the way for queer literature.
We’ll be chatting about the book on the Book Review podcast that airs Jan. 31. We’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by Jan. 27, and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here’s some related reading to get the conversation started:
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Our review of “Our Evenings”: “‘Our Evenings’ is that rare bird: a muscular work of ideas and an engrossing tale of one man’s personal odyssey as he grows up, framed in exquisite language, surrounding us like a Wall of Sound.” [Read the full review, by Hamilton Cain, here.]
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The Magazine’s 2018 profile of Alan Hollinghurst: “The past is everywhere present in Hollinghurst’s work. In a sense, his entire career has been an attempt to recover a lost — indeed, an actively suppressed — gay cultural heritage. Sex is a way into history for Hollinghurst precisely because it is something historians tend to neglect, and nothing is more appealing to the novelistic imagination than a blank.” [Read the full profile, written by Giles Harvey, here.]
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Alan Hollinghurst’s list of his 10 favorite books, shared with T Magazine in 2015: “I stick by the old heresy, that [Virginia] Woolf’s diary is her greatest achievement. An enthrallingly uncensored portrait of a brilliantly perceptive mind as it moves through a fascinating world in complex times.” [Read the full list here.]
We can’t wait to discuss the novel with you in January — and in the meantime, happy reading and happy New Year.
The post Book Club: Read ‘Our Evenings,’ by Alan Hollinghurst, With the Book Review appeared first on New York Times.
