Alan Hollingurst, "The Sparsholt Affair"

Alan Hollingurst discusses his novel, "The Sparsholt Affair", at Politics and Prose on 3/28/18.

Hollinghurst’s sixth novel is an incisive portrait of Britain from the 1940s to the present. Tracing the lives and loves of several generations of the upper-crust Sparsholt family, the narrative chronicles the period’s various literary and artistic movements, changing attitudes to class, and, most importantly, the transition from closeted gay life to social acceptance of homosexuality after the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act. As he did in The Stranger’s Child and his Man Booker Award-winning The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst brilliantly depicts the emotional and physical nuances of complex relationships while also illuminating the wider socio-historical currents that help shape his characters’ lives.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST is the author of the novels The Stranger's Child, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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.

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Produced by Tom Warren