It’s 13 years since Alan Hollinghurst carried off the Booker Prize for his ’80s-set gay classic The Line of Beauty, beating out both Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Mitchell’s epic Cloud Atlas. October sees the publication of Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multi-generational novel in the vein of 2011’s superb The Stranger’s Child.
Split into five parts, the book opens with a memoir by Freddie Green, a student at Oxford during the darkest depths of World War II. Green’s intimate circle of friends is shaken with the arrival of David Sparsholt, a handsome athlete waiting out his time at the college until he can join the Royal Air Force. Sparsholt quickly becomes a focus of attention for the tight-knit group.