Description

‘Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today.’ – Guardian

In October 1940, the handsome young David Sparsholt arrives in Oxford. A keen athlete and oarsman, he at first seems unaware of the effect he has on others – particularly on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax, son of a celebrated novelist and destined to become a writer himself. While the Blitz rages in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: an ephemeral, uncertain place, in which nightly blackouts conceal secret liaisons. Over the course of one momentous term, David and Evert forge an unlikely friendship that will colour their lives for decades to come . . .

Man Booker Prize-winning author Alan Hollinghurst’s masterly novel evokes the intimate relationships of a group of friends bound together by art, literature and love across three generations. It explores the social and sexual revolutions of the most pivotal years of the past century, whose life-changing consequences are still being played out to this day. Richly observed, disarmingly witty and emotionally charged, The Sparsholt Affair is an unmissable achievement from one of our finest writers.

Publisher Review

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 Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving. * Evening Standard * Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's * Spectator * 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 * Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. * Guardian * The work of a master . . . Hollinghurst's tale of dreaming spires and secrets is his finest novel yet. As one would expect of Hollinghurst, the greatest prose stylist writing in English today, this is a book full of glorious sentences, perhaps his most beautiful novel. -- Alex Preston * Observer * His prose is richly textured and alive with ironic wit. Alertness to tone and body language is acute. Urbanely satiric scenes, nicely fitted out with period detail, entertainingly unroll. Suave impalings of vanity are a speciality. * The Times *