Gay Men's Book Group at COH: [Our Evenings] (Lakeview)

Gay Men's Book Group-Chicago is a free, open monthly book discussion group welcoming male-identified individuals of all ages who are interested in reading and discussing gay-related literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Books to be discussed are selected by the group and posted on their Facebook page and via their newsletter email.

March's selection is Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst. From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, this piercing novel envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience, as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence.

Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities lie before Dave, even as he is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their brutish son. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. And as the novel accelerates towards the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.

Join us at the Center on Halsted (2nd floor) for a discussion of this captivating book.