Cart
Free Shipping in the UK
Proud to be B-Corp

Double Blind Edward St Aubyn

Double Blind By Edward St Aubyn

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn


£4.00
New RRP £18.99
Condition - Very Good
7 in stock

Double Blind Summary

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Patrick Melrose books: a major new novel exploring some of the biggest ideas and most pressing questions of our times.

'Both moving and so funny I had to stop every few pages to wipe tears from my eyes' OBSERVER, BEST BOOKS OF 2021

'Emotionally cogent and intellectually fascinating... I was gripped by it' Ian McEwan

Double Blind follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set between London, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics and neuroscience as it is about love, fear and courage.

When Olivia meets a new lover, Francis, just as she is welcoming her dearest friend Lucy back from New York, her life expands precipitously. 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.

Expansive, playful and compassionate, Double Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Most of all, it is a perfect expression of the interconnections it sets out to examine, and a moving evocation of an imagined world that is deeply intelligent, often tender, curious, and very much alive.

'The experience of St Aubyn is indelible' Jonathan Franzen
'Extraordinary' Sam Mendes
'A joy' Zadie Smith
'Among the giants of English fiction' Edmund White

Double Blind Reviews

If, 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 *
Double Blind is always interesting because St Aubyn is exacting. He takes all of this book's topics seriously; he distills them and gives them all a good shake . . . [Ian McEwan] isn't the only novelist unafraid of serious thinking about technology and science. A.S. Byatt, Richard Powers, Rivka Galchen, Martin Amis, Barbara Kingsolver and the playwrights Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn are among the others. With Double Blind, St Aubyn joins their company. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *
There is in Double Blind a compassion that St Aubyn has elsewhere tended to either eschew or keep implicit. Despite the novel's acerbic edge, St Aubyn is attentive to his characters' suffering and vulnerability 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 . . . Double Blind is yet another ambitious work by one of today's finest literary stylists -- Luke Warde * Irish Independent *
This is the best kind of novel of ideas, as entertaining as it is chewy, not to mention immensely pleasurable on the sentence level -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail *
St Aubyn has lost none of his ability to create rounded characters...and the witty dialogue is well up to the standard of the Melrose books -- Jake Kerridge * Daily Telegraph *
I am incapable of reading Edward St. Aubyn's writing without perpetual gasps of astonishment and admiration at the craft of his sentences . . . How consciousness emerges; what genetics can tell us about our existence; the failure of the utopian hopes of genetics to explain everything as recently as twenty years ago -- all of these things are alive in this novel of ideas, along with a deeply felt and moving story of human love and attachment. -- Adam Gopnik, author of A THOUSAND SMALL SANITIES
Where Patrick Melrose's trauma was childhood abuse and neglect, for Francis it's abuse and neglect of the planet, for which a new interconnectedness with nature is the only cure... It's bold of St Aubyn to write a novel that's so much about science and about so much science... ideas matter and so does the novel of ideas. -- Blake Morrison, Book of the Week * Guardian *
Edward St Aubyn's Double Blind is an impressive foray into the edge-lands of art and science... Art and science have long been uncomfortable bedfellows. However, some of the greatest works in each field are those that attempt to combine them. St Aubyn has had a mighty crack at it by using art as a vehicle for scientific contemplation... [he] will encourage even the least scientific mind to engage in deep thinking around of the twenty-first century's greatest moral issues, the future of biotechnology -- Fred Kelly * Tablet, *Novel of the Week* *
Amid a plethora of low-key or downbeat fiction, it [Double Blind] stands out for sheer energy and gusto. For anyone bored with the ordinary or predictable, this is a literary shot in the arm: not a dose of vaccine, but of rocket fuel -- Rosemary Goring * Herald *

About Edward St Aubyn

Edward St Aubyn was born in London. His superbly acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (winner of the Prix Femina etranger and shortlisted for the Man 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), and Dunbar, his re-imagining of King Lear for Hogarth Shakespeare.

Additional information

GOR011302638
9781787300255
1787300250
Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn
Used - Very Good
Hardback
Vintage Publishing
20210318
256
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. Overall we expect it to be in very good condition, but if you are not entirely satisfied please get in touch with us

Customer Reviews - Double Blind