The Sparsholt Affair - Hardcover

Hollinghurst, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345809726 ISBN 13: 9780345809728

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

ALAN HOLLINGHURST is the author of The Stranger's Child, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell, The Folding Star and the Man Booker Prize-winning and NBCC Award finalist The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London.

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 beautiful paintings, and the beautiful poems. Hollinghurst is a wicked satirist and a delicious plotter, but I most admire the seriousness with which he takes beauty—its relationship to pleasure and power, secrecy and love. . . . As the novel proceeds, its own beauties deepen.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“The joy [Hollinghurst] takes in life’s small shards of beauty don’t feel like a wordsmith’s performance but instead like the joy of life itself. . . . Time passes and people die. The instants of pure splendor are what make life livable, make it writable. The Sparsholt Affair affirms them, again.” —The New Republic

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0345809726
• ISBN 13: 9780345809728
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432