Product Description From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Man Booker Prize, a sweeping new novel that explores richly complex relationships between fathers and sons as it spans seven transformative decades in England, from the 1940s through the present. David Sparsholt is a man who commands attention. As a student at Oxford during the early days of World War II, he's handsome, powerful and alluring to all who meet him--both women and men. His two closest friends, Evert and Freddie, are aspiring artists who are quickly drawn into Sparsholt's magnetic field even as the mores of the day complicate their ambitions--aesthetic, romantic and otherwise. Twenty years later, all three men find themselves in unexpected positions--sometimes rewarded, but sometimes thwarted--vis-à-vis love and career; money and stature. David Sparsholt is now married with a wife and son, having claimed fame as a fighter pilot in the war, but also infamy after a scandalous affair rocked his entire family--especially his teenage son, Johnny. It's the 1960s, and upheavals of all sorts are rampant in England and around the world, including as we follow Johnny's struggles to untangle his own private web of identity, art and sexuality. Together, these men's trials and triumphs present a complicated portrait of masculinity and artistic worth in England's upper echelons, where one's name carries the legacy, but also the telling scars, of the generations before him. Engaging, atmospheric, told in lush and gorgeous prose, The Sparsholt Affair is a brilliant novel about sensuality and scruples set against a backdrop of radical social change, from a writer whose work is as provocative as it is precisely rendered. Review INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “The Sparsholt Affair is masterly in scope. . . . [Hollinghurst] combines his broad sweep with plenty of equally impressive close-up analysis—and all in prose that manages to be both utterly sumptuous and utterly precise. . . . Like Hollinghurst’s other books, The Sparsholt Affair is dazzlingly good: the best new novel I think I’ve read this year.” —James Walton, The Spectator (UK) “This luminous novel has a bit of everything, crossing decades and perspectives to show how secrets and social upheaval transform a single family.” —Reader’s Digest “The Sparsholt Affair confirms Alan Hollinghurst’s status as a literary master. . . . He’s simply brilliant at capturing the nuance textures of life—everything from the enveloping hues of moonlight and the exact sounds of the street—like the great sneeze, as he calls it, of a truck braking to the insecurities, resentments and lusts that race through the guests at a party. The Sparsholt Affair is filled with scenes that let us feel what it is to stand atop a tower, watching for German bombers, bid at your first auction or paint a portrait of an entitled rich family you just can’t stand. . . . [Hollinghurst’s] books crackle with the rebellious energy that, here, has been harnessed to the more refined ends of a literary master.” —John Powers, NPR “Like Henry James, [Hollinghurst] writes prose so dense with lines of beauty that you can’t quite catch up to them in real time, lines that are razor close to human experience and yet—or therefore—retain a continual capacity for surprise. There’s nothing he could write that I wouldn’t read.” —Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune “More expansive and arguably even better than Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize–winning The Line of Beauty, [Hollinghurst’s] sixth novel turns the exquisite writer’s chief concerns, queer history and postwar Britain, into an ingeniously told family saga.” —Boris Kachka, Vulture “To read an Alan Hollinghurst novel is to encounter beauty in its many forms. There’s the beauty of the sentences—Jamesian sentences that somehow are both intensely shaped and effortlessly supple. There are the beautiful characters whose fit bodies promise the sex that Hollinghurst usually delivers. There are the beautiful houses, and the bea
The Sparsholt Affair
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Author: Hollinghurst, Alan
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780345809728
Details:
Author: Hollinghurst, Alan
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Format: Deckle Edge
Number Of Pages: 432
Release Date: 13-03-2018
Package Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.7 x 1.7 inches Languages: English
EAN: 9780345809728
