The Sparsholt Affair: A Novel

"Who, or what, is a Sparsholt? A student, a pilot, an engineer, a sex object, the focus of a seamy scandal? David Sparsholt inhabits all these roles and more in Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, a luscious, epic work that spans seven decades and several generations, beginning at Oxford University during the hair-raising blackout years of the Blitz. In the ‘60s pop hit “To Sir With Love,” Lulu sings of going “from crayons to perfume,” and similar transformations occur all the time in this ripe slice of British life in a bohemian, intellectual, artistic milieu, a Brideshead Revisited revisited."