The Sparsholt Affair - Softcover

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 * 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 * 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 * 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 * 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've just started The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst, my favourite living novelist. It had better be good. -- Charlotte Mendelson * Guardian * 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 * 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 * Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's * Spectator * Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving. * Evening Standard * 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

In 1940, David Sparsholt goes up to Oxford University. Charismatic and good-looking, he seems to have little awareness of the effect he has on others, not least on the lonely and romantic Evert Dax. As the Blitz rages fifty miles away in London, the university exists in a strange limbo, in which nightly blackouts conceal secret liaisons. Aware that they will soon be called up, the two men forge an unlikely friendship that will colour their lives for decades to come... The Sparsholt Affair tells the story of a circle of friends and families, with David and Evert at their centre ; we see their reputations rise and fall, watch as one becomes the subject of a national scandal, and follow the impact of such sensational events across the generations. Through this captivating human drama, Alan Hollinghurst explores the social, sexual and cultural revolutions that made the world we know today.