OUR EVENINGS
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
Random House (
non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 Kindle edition, available now
LONGLISTED for the
2026 Dublin Literary Award...the shortlist of six will be announced on 7 April 2026, the winner(s) in May's festival.
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.
Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.
Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son.
Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.
Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.
This is “one of our most gifted writers” (
The Boston Globe) sweeping readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Vignettes from the privileged and fortunate life of a mixed-"race" (useless term, divisive and ill-defined, but lacking an appropriate alternative one here) queer man and his circle of friends of his youth as they move through the stages of life, change partners, grow, and grow old, in the UK of our recent past.
Details are as synopsized by the publisher above; my reading of it was undertaken because Author Hollinghurst has never failed to give me the very agreeable experience of following him through a logical and internally consistent plot led by the loveliest sentences creating relatable, heightened-into-beauty situations and images.
Job done again. I'm in the contented majority of readers who felt well-served by this outing (!) into Hollinghurst's familiar-but-better reality. I even had the thoroughly unpleasant duty of feeling the humanity of a political-right radical and Brexiteer.
Enjoyable, all of it, but not new or freshly imagined by the author of
The Line of Beauty, hence that missing half-star.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE BOOK OF AWESOME QUEER HEROES: How the LGBTQ+ Community Changed the World for the Better
ERIC ROSSWOOD, KATHLEEN ARCHAMBEAU, KATE KENDELL, Esq.
Mango (
non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Discover how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people have changed the world into the one we know and love in this riveting history book.
Historic Icons in the LGBTQ+ Community
Discover how gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people have changed the world into the one we know and love in this riveting history book.
Pride across the ages. The LGBTQ+ community has made countless positive impacts throughout history as scientists, world leaders, athletes, and entrepreneurs, and each one of them deserves to be celebrated in
The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes. Going into the history and achievements of famous queer icons, this LGBTQ+ book is a love letter to those who have brought love, positivity, and advancement into our society. Let author and activist Eric Rosswood and Kathleen Archambeau guide your discovery of amazing facts about each historical figure and how their lives have shaped ours in more ways than one.
How they are still inspiring us today.
The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes doesn’t just cover what so many LGBTQ+ people have accomplished; it also shares how we can achieve our dreams by learning from their persistence. Learn about activists such as Marsha P. Johnson, X González, Sylvia Rivera and many more in their fight for progressive change against discrimination.
Meet heroes and world-changers you may have heard of, with biographies about:
Star athletes such as Esera Tuaolo and Billie Jean King
Entertainers like Sir Elton John, Margaret Cho, Daniela Vega, and RuPaul
Government and military officials such as Eric Fanning and Leo Varadkar
Trailblazers in science and technology including, Alan Turing and Lynn Conway
Other historic icons like Oscar Wilde and Bayard Rustin
If you enjoy LGBTQ+ books and memoirs such as
Hollywood Pride,
The House of Hidden Meaning, or
Karma, then you’ll love
The Book of Awesome Queer Heroes.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I deliberately left publishing this review until after Yule because, I'm sad to say, there are families (of a sort) where a young adult could be in trouble if this book was given to them. I still think any queer kid over, say, thirteen would hugely benefit from receiving this book as a way of being reassured that they're not the first queer person, nor the only one who had a tough road to follow into adulthood.
Brief biographical sketches and images of the ancestors of their own people will encourage a young soul in need of the security and reassurance of belonging to a lineage.
At under $15, the modest price will more than repay your investment in a young queer kid's anchor into reality. I don't know how much longer these books will be available, so I'll recommend this one as a gift to give now while They still don't make it ever-harder to procure.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LAST NIGHT IN NUUK
NIVIAQ KORNELIUSSEN
Black Cat/Grove Press (
non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: A witty and fearless debut from a stunning new voice,
Last Night in Nuuk is a work of daring invention about young life in Greenland. Through monologues, emails, and text exchanges, she brilliantly weaves together the coming of age of five distinct characters: a woman who’s “gone off sausage” (men); her brother, in a secret affair with a powerful married man; a lesbian couple confronting an important transition; and the troubled young woman who forces them all to face their fears. With vibrant imagery and daring prose, Korneliussen writes honestly about finding yourself and growing into the person you were meant to be. Praised for creating “its own genre” (
Politiken, Denmark),
Last Night in Nuuk is a brave entrance onto the literary scene and establishes her as a voice that cannot be ignored.
I RECEIVED A COPY AS A GIFT. THANK YOU.
My Review: I got one of these eight years ago from a friend now vanished into the internet's anonymity. I'd heard of it on Lambda Literary's reviews site.
There's always a novelty factor when someone from a place less frequented (to self-centered monoglot Anglophone readers) writes about their home place. It's new, it's fresh, it isn't a place you went on holiday in your teens. Extra exciting when the author's somewhere on the QUILTBAG spectrum and sets a queer story of five people in different gradations of outness in a place where that is not the first thing that comes to mind as a probability.
I had never once in my life considered the presence of QUILTBAG culture existing at all in Greenland.
A book of stories about different members of that community, deeply enmeshed in each others' lives, felt irresistible, and I was eager to dive in...then Life got in the way, my treebooks got relocated for me (much against my will), and it never happened until now. This is my last read of 2024. It's not a fat book so I thought it might be okay for me to hold.
Not a good choice. Much pain, three days to read under two hundred pages, an actual new gouty tophus formed from the exercise.
Yet I heartily enjoyed the novelty factor, I was on board with the use of this generation's epistolary style of texts and emails and social-media posts, since the characters are all young adults and this is their cultural landscape. Their landscape overlapped with mine of the same era in my life with its deeply predictable drunken sex and bewildering rage coming at them from unexpected places, aka bullying.
I don't think I'd've loved it more if I'd read it in '18. I didn't adore it now. I fell under its spell of novelty, enjoyed the reminder of how very powerful a force lust was in my past and how much fun it all was, and in the end was mildly glad I'd read it.
Won't pick it up again, will put it in the Little Free Library come spring, and might read the author's next book.
Equally might not.
Either outcome is fine.
