The Sparsholt Affair

Description

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 . . . Alan Hollinghurst's masterly new 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.

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.

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 * Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair is startling, radical, embedded in tradition but entirely new in final effect - the novel that other novelists were all talking about this year. -- Philip Hensher * Guardian * I've just started The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst, my favourite living novelist. It had better be good. -- Charlotte Mendelson * Guardian * I had the distinct sense, on finishing Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, that I might have read next year's Booker-winner before this year's had even been announced. The Sparsholt Affair is a sweeping and intimate masterpiece, full of sensual pleasures and observational wisdom. -- Geoff Dyer * Guardian * I was glad George Saunders won the Man Booker and for next year's prize it's hard to look beyond Alan Hollinghurst's masterful The Sparsholt Affair, which I found thrillingly stylish and gripping. -- Alex Preston * Guardian * At a time when it seems you only have to write a novel in the present tense with mentions of the internet to be categorised as experimental, Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair proved the real thing. It's not often that readers see such a fundamental rethinking of what fiction can do, and rarer still that the result is such a joy. -- Philip Hensher * Spectator * But for narrative ambition and sheer comic joy, by far the best thing I've read this year is Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair. It's a novel with brains and heart and balls - the kind you find yourself wanting to read at two speeds at once: very quickly, so that you can get on to the next page, and very slowly, so that you can linger over each beautifully crafted sentence. He's a writer who makes every word sing. -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst * Spectator * The Sparsholt Affair begins with a group of friends in wartime Oxford who become obsessed with the beautiful, heartily unintellectual and apparently heterosexual David Sparsholt. Then we leap in time, to hear from Sparsholt's son, Johnny. In the gaps between sections, something happened. The "affair" of the novel's title is "some sort of scandal" in the 1960s involving Sparsholt, a Tory MP and rent boys. Alan Hollinghurst explores the effects of a scandal over time and generations. * The Times, Saturday Review, The best new paperbacks to read on holiday this summer *