A New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, New York Post, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews, and Slate Best Book of the Year "Beautiful and complex. . . . Hollinghurst achieves [a] kind of symphonic effect." --
The New York Times Book Review "Undeniably the work of a master. . . . There's nothing [Hollinghurst] could write that I wouldn't read." --Charles Finch,
Chicago Tribune "[Hollinghurst's] language has a burnished, witty richness and an exacting clarity of a kind that reinvigorates the act of reading; every page has something worthy of being underlined and revisited." --
The New Yorker "Gorgeous. . . . To read an Alan Hollinghurst novel is to encounter beauty in its many forms." --
San Francisco Chronicle "[Hollinghurst's] sensibilities are so fine you sense he can detect a pea beneath 20 mattresses when it comes to failures of tact, poise and discernment." --
The New York Times "Ingeniously constructed and delicately written . . . a queer classic so achingly powerful, you'll savor every page." --
Entertainment Weekly "Utterly captivating and immersive . . . Hollinghurst remains one of our most gifted writers, unspooling sentences as precise and lyrical, deft and ingenious, as any in the English language." --Priscilla Gilman,
The Boston Globe "A literary master. . . . [Hollinghurst is] simply brilliant at capturing the nuance textures of life." --"Fresh Air," NPR
"A work of characteristic subtlety and forthrightness. . . . [Hollinghurst] is a writer for whom sex and fine art, sensual and aesthetic bliss, are not categorically discrete activities but points along a spectrum of delight." --
The New York Times Magazine "[An] intimate epic." --David Canfield,
Entertainment Weekly "A novel shaped by the keen understanding of how we live and the repercussions of the previous generation's actions." --
Vogue "While the novel's gilded prose calls back to a bygone age, its evocation of that age is strikingly unstable, blurred by conflicting accounts and haunted by gaps and omissions. . . . At its heart are volatile secrets that can never be riddled into the light." --
The Wall Street Journal "A deeply pleasurable riffing on the repressed English novel." --
Harper's Magazine "Epic, elegant, and intricately constructed." --NPR
"An amazing amount of the passion and folly of the human comedy is woven into [a] modest life, all of it beautifully observed and memorably articulated." --
The Guardian "Hollinghurst's mellifluous prose is as fine and subtly shaded as ever, and his full, persuasive immersion of the reader in the book's far-flung eras is impeccable." --
The Seattle Times "As accomplished and pleasurable as anything [Hollinghurst] has written." --
Financial Times "A long, lusciously observant dive into a certain slice of 20th-century English life. . . . A wonder, full of wit and tenderness, rendered in prose of unostentatious, classic beauty. There is no better English stylist alive." --
Slate "Rich with the kind of emotional detail that marks [Hollinghurst's] best work." --
Newsday "The instants of pure splendor are what make life livable, make it writable.
The Sparsholt Affair affirms them, again." --
The New Republic "A sweeping and intimate masterpiece, full of sensual pleasures and observational wisdom." --Geoff Dyer
"
Call Me By Your Name meets Evelyn Waugh in a gorgeous novel about the generations-long aftershocks of a youthful tryst." --
Esquire "Hollinghurst's novels remind you of the deep pleasures of reading novels." --
Evening Standard