You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Today, two novels concern with race, class, and the outsider.

In entitlement, his first book since pandemic hit Leave the World Behind,

rumour on alarm looks at the ways in which not just wealth,

but proximity to it, can corrupt. But first, Alan Hollinghurst, whose novels from the swimming

pool library to the Sparshall affair and the Booker-winning The Line of Beauty, have mapped a unique

landscape of gay desire, art, politics, class and Englishness. In his latest, Our Evenings,

we followed Dave Wyn, a mixed-race child from 1960s public school through to his acting career

and the pandemic of 2020. His intimate history illuminating larger cultural and political shifts

in the nation.

Alan Hollinghurst, welcome to Open Book.

Thank you.

Alan, I'd like to start by asking, who is Dave Wynne?

And why did you want to tell the whole of his life in our evenings?

Dave Wynne is someone we meet first at the age of 13 in 1962, and he is the son of a white English mother,

...