Evenings and Weekends is set during the “tense summer” of 2019, a period of profound sociopolitical anxiety in the United Kingdom. In the wake of the 2016 referendum to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union (or Brexit), the British government struggled to facilitate a transition that would enable its economy and social services to function without the transnational agreements and mechanisms that union membership had afforded them. The month in which the novel is set, June 2019, coincides with an administrative shift marking the end of Theresa May’s premiership and the elections that would result in Boris Johnson becoming prime minister. Johnson’s government would initially plan to leave the union without a withdrawal agreement in place, exacerbating socioeconomic conditions and driving fears of life after Brexit.

Economically, the characters in McKenna’s novel embody the precarity faced by many millennials in late-2010s London. Ed’s job as a gig economy courier and the couple’s inability to afford their damp, rotting apartment in Hackney reflect a well-documented reality of insecure work and a severe housing crisis. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2019, Londoners spent a far higher proportion of their income on rent than people in any other English region (Office for National Statistics. “Private rental affordability, England: 2012 to 2020.” United Kingdom Statistics Office, 2021). Maggie and Ed’s reluctant decision to leave the city for Basildon highlights the difficult compromises many young people were forced to make between urban freedom and financial survival, grounding their personal crises in the tangible political and economic pressures of the time.

The year also saw the parliamentary declaration of a climate emergency, spurred in part by climate strike actions held across London by activist groups like Extinction Rebellion. These actions reflected pervading social dread over the government’s failure to recognize and mitigate the impact of climate change. McKenna’s novel captures this atmosphere of uncertainty, which directly mirrors the characters’ personal instability. The central metaphor of a northern bottlenose whale stranded in the Thames becomes a focal point for this collective angst, with blame attributed to “carbon emissions, single-use plastics, the European Union, [and] English nationalism” (2). This ecological disaster reflects the characters’ feelings of being trapped and out of place.