Description
Book Synopsis'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
Trade ReviewIf, as Henry James said, the first duty of the novelist is to be interesting, he would be happy in St Aubyn's company.
Double Blind is
emotionally cogent and intellectually fascinating. There are reflections and conversations here which adroitly evoke those important intersections where science and our urgent contemporary concerns meet.
I was gripped by it. -- Ian McEwan
Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But
as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking
about these issues for decades -- Hadley Freeman * Guardian *
This is a novel with heart...
Double Blind is both clever and compassionate, confirming St Aubyn as
among the brightest lights of contemporary British literature -- Alex Preston * Spectator *
Shakespearean in scope and tone,
moving from the intimate to the universal within paragraphs and providing tragedy, comedy and human frailty... 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...
Brimful of energy, this novel asks big questions-"How could one ever truly enter into another subjectivity?"-without giving us all the answers... Pacey, caustic and self-aware, it is this neatly choreographed dance of themes and ideas that makes for
such absorbing and immediate reading. -- 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...
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. -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
