BORDERKITCHEN PRESENTS ALAN HOLLINGHURST
The Crossing Border team wishes you a very happy 2025! A year with many enjoyable reading hours and new literary discoveries.
BorderKitchen will welcome many exciting writers in the coming months, so keep an eye on the newsletter. And don’t forget to mark the Crossing Border Festival dates in your diary: 5-9 November 2025.
The new year kicks off with a BorderKitchen event on 12 February with a very special guest: the renowned English novelist Alan Hollinghurst. He will talk about his new book Our Evenings at the Central Library in The Hague.
Our Evenings is about Dave Win, who is thirteen years old when he first stays away from home with the Hadlows, who fund his scholarship to the local boarding school where he shares a class with their son Giles. For Dave, this means a world of tumultuous new possibilities, but it also exposes him to Giles' jealousy and violent behavior. Our Evenings spans half a century and shows how the boys go their separate ways—Dave becomes a talented actor who struggles with conventions and discrimination, while Giles grows into a more powerful and dangerous politician. Our Evenings is Dave Win's own account of his life as a schoolboy and student, his first loves, his time in London and touring with an experimental theater group, and a love later in life that brings him both a new sense of happiness and vulnerable security.
Dark and radiant, poignant and devilishly funny: Alan Hollinghurst's new novel paints a portrait of modern England through the sharply observed and often unsettling experiences of one man. It is a story about race and class, theater and sexuality, love and violence, from one of the greatest writers of our time.
Alan Hollinghurst (1954) is the author of seven novels, including The Swimming Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), The Line of Beauty (winner of the Booker Prize), The Stranger's Child (longlisted for the Booker Prize), and The Sparsholt Affair. He lives in London.
"Our Evenings is an outright astonishing novel, both subtle and merciless, and daring in the way it tackles issues such as race, class difference, sexuality, and social origin against the elegant backdrop of London and the surrounding counties. It is the story of a country undergoing drastic changes, without its citizens being aware of them. The novel moves so beautifully and gracefully through time that by the end I experienced a profound sense of loss." - Tash Aw
This event will be English-spoken.
Alan Hollinghurst will sign books after the interview. His books (Eng/Dutch) will be for sale at the event.
Date: 12 February 2025
Location: Centrale Bibliotheek Den Haag, 5th floor
Time: 20.00 - 21.00 (doors open 19.45)
Tickets: €12,50
