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Episode details

Radio 4,29 Sep 2024,28 mins

Alan Hollinghurst

Open Book

Available for over a year

Chris Power talks to Alan Hollinghurst. His novels from The Swimming-Pool Library to The Sparsholt Affair, and the Booker-winning The Line of Beauty, have over the last 30 years mapped a unique landscape of queer desire, art, politics, class and sense of Englishness. In his latest book, Our Evenings, we follow the life of Dave Win, a mixed race child who lives with his mother in a provincial English town from his bursary funded 1960s public school, to Oxford University, through his radical acting career of early adulthood and on to older age and the pandemic of 2020. Dave Win's intimate memories of maternal bond, friends and lovers illuminate larger cultural and political shifts in the landscape. The American writer Rumaan Alam talks about Entitlement the follow up novel to the highly successful Leave the World Behind. He explores why he wanted to write about money, and it's corrupting effect on a young woman who realises that doing the right thing may not always bring you the rewards you've earned. And with long nights ahead, we have a recommended read of ghost stories from Drummond Moir of Atlantic Books. Book List - Sunday 29 September The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst Haunted Tales by Adam Macqueen Entitlement by Rumaan Alam Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

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