Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Edward St Aubyn was born in London. His internationally acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk (winner of the Prix Femina étranger and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and At Last. The series was made into a BAFTA award-winning Sky Atlantic TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. St Aubyn is also the author of A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Lost for Words (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Dunbar and Double Blind.If, as Henry James said, the first duty of the novelist is to be interesting, he would be happy in St Aubyn's company. <i>Double Blind</i> is <b>emotionally cogent and intellectually fascinating</b>. There are reflections and conversations here which adroitly evoke those important intersections where science and our urgent contemporary concerns meet.<b> I was gripped by it</b>.
- Ian McEwan,
<b><i>Double Blind</i> is a book of big ideas</b>, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But <b>as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt</b>, because St Aubyn has been thinking<i> </i>about these issues for decades
- Hadley Freeman, Guardian
<b>This is a novel with heart</b>... <i>Double Blind </i>is both clever and compassionate, confirming St Aubyn as <b>among the brightest lights of contemporary British literature</b>
- Alex Preston, Spectator
Shakespearean in scope and tone, <b>moving from the intimate to the universal within paragraphs and providing tragedy, comedy and human frailty</b>... A less practised author would run the risk of over-saturating all the disparate strands, but St Aubyn offers comment on the natural world, genetics, family dynamics, philosophy, psychiatry and ecology without forgetting the tapestry-like threads of the story itself-and provides a satisfying resolution to boot... <b>Brimful of energy, this novel asks big questions-"How could one ever truly enter into another subjectivity?"-without giving us all the answers</b>... Pacey, caustic and self-aware, it is this neatly choreographed dance of themes and ideas that makes for <b>such absorbing and immediate reading</b>.
- Zoe Apostolides, Prospect
Likeable and rounded characters and a celebration of the best things in life: the wilderness of Knepp and a touching but complex love story...<b> St Aubyn's reinvention as a writer is heroic and astonishing. He has emerged from the "very difficult truth" of this childhood to write brilliantly about that and, now, about a lot more. </b>
- Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
There is in <i>Double Blind</i> a compassion that St Aubyn has elsewhere tended to either eschew or keep implicit. Despite the novel's acerbic edge, <b>St Aubyn is attentive to his characters' suffering and vulnerability </b>whatever their privileges . . . St Aubyn's prose is as elegant as anybody familiar with his previous work might expect. Indeed, so consistent is the writing's quality the reader is apt to miss its many charms, acclimated as they are to it . . . <i>Double Blind</i> is <b>yet another ambitious work by one of today's finest literary stylists</b>
- Luke Warde, Irish Independent
This is the <b>best kind of novel of ideas</b>, as entertaining as it is chewy, not to mention<b> immensely pleasurable on the sentence level</b>
- Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
St Aubyn has lost none of his ability to create rounded characters...and the <b>witty dialogue is well up to the standard of the Melrose books</b>
- Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph
Where Patrick Melrose's trauma was childhood abuse and neglect, for Francis it's abuse and neglect of the planet, for which <b>a new interconnectedness with nature is the only cure</b>... It's bold of St Aubyn to write a novel that's so much about science and about so <i>much </i>science... <b>ideas matter and so does the novel of ideas</b>.
- Blake Morrison, Book of the Week, Guardian
Both moving and so funny I had to stop every few pages to wipe tears from my eyes
- Ruth Ozeki, Observer, *Books of the Year*
'I was gripped by it' IAN McEWAN
Three lives collide, not one of them will emerge unchanged - the exhilarating new novel from the author of the Patrick Melrose series.
When Olivia meets a new lover, Francis, just as she is welcoming her dearest friend Lucy back from New York, her life expands dramatically. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off-grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two - but Lucy has news of her own that binds the trio unusually close.
Over the months that follow, Lucy's boss Hunter, Olivia's psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends' orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged.
'Moving and so funny' Observer, Books of the Year
'Heroic and astonishing' Sunday Times
'Clever and compassionate... A novel with heart' Spectator
'Entertaining... Immensely pleasurable' Daily Mail
When Olivia meets Francis, a young naturalist rewilding a corner of Sussex, and is reunited with her best friend Lucy, recently returned from a high-flying career in New York, her life expands in exciting and disorienting ways.