The 20 books to read this summer

Newly released in paperback, Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings is the story of Dave Win, an Anglo-Burmese actor born in the late 1940s. Unfolding across seven decades, the novel moves from the 1960s to the pandemic, tracing the quiet, formative moments of Win’s life with unhurried grace. Our Evenings is a novel about acceptance: of time’s passage, of one’s limitations, of the small victories that make existence meaningful. It is a work of quiet power, a novel that finds its emotional weight not in dramatic confrontations but in the slow, steady accumulation of a life, with all its beauty and sadness.

Picador, £9.99; order a copy from The Observer Shop for £8.99