Literary Fiction you should be reading as the nights get longer: Our Evenings by Alan

OUR EVENINGS by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador £22, 496pp)

Our Evenings is a work of such expansive, affecting brilliance and is a must for the Booker Prize next year (it is published outside of the dates to be considered for this year’s award).

Spanning six decades of change, from the 1960s to Covid, it follows the loves and losses of biracial scholarship boy Dave Win as he moves through boarding school and Oxford, into the world of theatre, where his acting talent doesn’t inhibit discrimination (being gay, he faces a double dose).

There is richness aplenty on these pages: acute social comedy, potent set pieces, some mesmerisingly beautiful distillations of atmosphere and emotion.

It’s all woven masterfully into an intimate first-person meditation on modern England.

THE UNFINISHED HARAULD HUGHES by Richard Ayoade (Faber £16.99, 192pp)

The Unfinished Business of Harauld Hughes is available now from the Mail Bookshop

RICHARD AYOADE, best known as an actor for his Bafta-winning role in The IT Crowd, boosts his literary credentials with a clever, questing third novel.

Inhabiting the quasi-fictional persona established in his previous works – a filmmaker and amateur dentist named, yes, ‘Richard Ayoade’ – he adds extra layers of complexity here, embarking on a quest to rescue from obscurity one Harauld Hughes, a supposedly cult midcentury playwright who looks strikingly like Ayoade himself.

The book tracks the making of a doomed documentary about Hughes and features interview transcripts as well as archival findings.

It’s in part a piquant, insider’s send-up of the telly industry, but there’s room, too, for touching reflections on identity, artistic creation, and celebrity’s caprice.

It’s also full of the kind of honest, life-enhancing hilarity that will have you guffawing on public transport.

A SIMPLE INTERVENTION by Yael Inokai (Peirene £12.99, 192pp)

RECOGNITION of inequality in the provision of women’s healthcare may be new but the dire historic treatment of female mental health patients has long inspired novelists.

The latest is Swiss author Yael Inokai, whose English-language debut, translated from German by Marielle Sutherland, channels the likes of feminist classics such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.

Our heroine is Meret, a nurse on a psychiatric ward where groundbreaking surgery frees women of ‘disorders’ like rage.

It’s a supposedly painless procedure and Meret is devoted to her work – until she falls for fellow nurse Sarah, who questions the outcomes of such ‘interventions’. 

When treatment of a high profile patient goes awry, Meret finds Sarah’s doubts impossible to ignore.