Promotional Information

The major new novel from the author of the award-winning Patrick Melrose series

About the Author

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.

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
*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
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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
*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
*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
*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.
*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
*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
*Herald*