The Sparsholt Affair - Rilegato

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)

Hollinghurst can make language do what he wants . . . It makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem thin and underachieving. (Evening Standard)

Few writers' prose can throw a party as easily as retire to the library as Hollinghurst's (Spectator)

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)

Hollinghurst has a strong, perhaps unassailable claim to be the best English novelist working today. (Guardian)

The work of a master . . . Hollinghurst’s tale of dreaming spires and secrets is his finest novel yet. As one would expect of Hollinghurst, the greatest prose stylist writing in English today, this is a book full of glorious sentences, perhaps his most beautiful novel. (Alex Preston Observer)

His prose is richly textured and alive with ironic wit. Alertness to tone and body language is acute. Urbanely satiric scenes, nicely fitted out with period detail, entertainingly unroll. Suave impalings of vanity are a speciality. (The Times)

Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is almost as hard to pin down as it is to put down. The immense assurance of the writing, the deep knowledge of the settings and periods in which the story unfolds, the mingling of cruel humour and lyrical tenderness, the insatiable interest in human desire from its most refined to its most brutally carnal, grip you as tightly as any thriller. (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)

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)

The Sparsholt Affair is the long-awaited sixth novel from the supreme stylist of British fiction and previous winner of the Man Booker Prize. From Oxford during the dark days of the Second World War to contemporary London, this is a masterly novel about sexuality, art and family secrets.