It’s 20 years since Alan Hollinghurst last appeared at Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki as a freshly-minted Booker Prize winner for The Line of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair followed to huge acclaim and his latest novel, Our Evenings, has had a rapturous reception from readers and critics alike. The Sunday Times declared it “the best novel that’s been written about contemporary Britain in the past 10 years”.