Oiur Evenings has a lot about it that will be familiar to Hollinghurst fans. Its protagonist, David Win, is a mixed-race child of a single parent, from the lower middle classes (his mother runs a small dressmaking business) in rural Southern England. He is a scholar at a prestigious fee-paying boys’ school, the recipient of an exhibition awarded by the arts benefactor Mark Harlow. The novel’s early chapters detail events during David’s time at that school, including a weekend at the Harlows’ country home, and an adventurous school ‘challenge’ in which he is paired with the Harlows’ son Giles (who we know from the book’s flash-forward introduction is to become a notorious right-wing politician and Brexit architect). David makes his way in life, developing an interest in acting and generally doing reasonably (if unspectacularly) well, all the while contending with his points of difference.

Enter Ghost follows Sonia, a 38-year-old British/Dutch actor, with Palestinian heritage, who has recently broken off an affair with a London theatre director. She decides to take some time out from her career to visit her sister, Haneen, in Haifa. The two sisters spent summers in their youth visiting family in Haifa, and the latter returned there to forge a career as an academic. Haneen introduces Sonia to her friend Mariam, a theatre director, who is in the early stages of putting on an Arabic-language production of Hamlet in the West Bank. While Sonia is initially reluctant to get involved, she is pulled in by Mariam’s bluntness and idealistic spirit and agrees to help out with rehearsals, before eventually getting swept up by the energy of the production and taking on the role of Gertrude.