THE SPARSHOLT AFFAIR

by Alan Hollinghurst

Mohsin Hamid is a writer always in tune with the zeitgeist. His latest, can lay claim to being one of the first post-brexit, post-refugee-crisis fictions, preoccupied with the will to leave and the wish to remain; about being torn asunder; about the meaning of migration and belonging. It is a profound – and profoundly complex – meditation on the psychological uncertainty, anguish and alienation engendered by leaving one’s homeland. Hamid has again written a poignant, relevant parable of our times.

In Alan Hollinghurst returns to – and revels in – his favourite tropes: gay life, and how it changed, in a changing England; the line of beauty (to borrow the title of the novel that made him famous) that runs through art, architecture and literature; and how the passage of time – inevitable, cruel, kind – burnishes or alters reputations as well as our memory and perception of events. The Sparsholt Affair is made up of five sections, and is spread across three generations. It is as richly layered as his previous – and, for my money, best – novel, A Stranger’s Child. It is a gem, polished to perfection.

by the Libyan-american writer, Hisham Matar, is a searing, haunting memoir. When Matar was 19, his father – a dissident during the Gaddafi regime – was picked up from home and imprisoned. Amid the torture and other hardships of prison life, he would write to his family. Then, the letters stopped. To this day,

Matar does not know if his father died in prison, was executed, or is alive somewhere. This is the harrowing account of Matar’s search for his father. In turns tender and angry (and at times both), The Return explores the bond between a father and a son, the notion of home, and the price one can pay for one’s political and intellectual beliefs.

Exit West, The Sparsholt Affair, The Return