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Reading lists

The best audiobooks of 2021

A black and white image of Merlin Sheldrake and Edward St Aubyn

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Features

Exploring symbiosis and psychedelics: Merlin Sheldrake meets Edward St Aubyn

Dunbar

King Lear, Retold

Comedy and tragedy converge in this tale of high finance and brutal family betrayal, from ‘The most brilliant English novelist of his generation’ Alan Hollinghurst

St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat… His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect

Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty

Of all the novelist and play matches in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, that of Edward St Aubyn with King Lear seems the finest. Shakespeare’s blackest, most surreal and hectic tragedy sharpened by one of our blackest, more surreal and hectic wits… It's an enticing prospect... His Lear is Henry Dunbar, the head of an international media corporation – like Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch – and is brilliantly awful… The other characters, even minor ones, are also wittily and cleverly updated

He is an inspired choice to retell King Lear for Hogarth Shakespeare’s anniversary series. Dunbar emerges as one of the finest contributions in a line-up glittering with literary stars…He has transplanted the heart of the story into the present and made it feel remarkably authentic

A piercing portrait of existential agony... savagely acute

Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption… An Aubynesque simile can brighten a grey passage… Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining

St Aubyn is excellent on the characters’ psychology... powerful and moving

Malevolently enjoyable… The scenes that feel most real, interestingly, are those that are most fantastical, when we are drawn inside the chaos of Dunbar’s unravelling mind… Here the language feels sculpted and precise, Dunbar’s obsessive solipsism both violent and convincing… St Aubyn’s talent for brittle one-liners is as lethal as ever

In Mother’s Milk – the fourth Melrose novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker – St Aubyn gave a terrifyingly believable description of senility, and he applies the same skill here as his hero’s sense of time and his own sanity fall away with a tragic semi-awareness… He is at his funniest when describing characters at their worst. He narrates their terrible inner thoughts with a bleakly comic ironic detachment

As Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image flames up... Here, we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity

Lively… Beautifully written and caperish in tone, St Aubyn’s Dunbar plays the Bard’s story for savage laughs

Perhaps Edward St Aubyn’s most impressive achievement in this retelling…is to find a way of structuring the story so that it rattles along at a breathless pace from start to finish. Somehow, even though we know what’s going to happen…Dunbar is still a page turner… Even if you ignore all the intricate metatextual game-playing, this is still a magnificent book: a cautionary tale about what happens when people value power and money more than family and basic human decency, imaginatively re-tooled for our hyper-materialistic age

St Aubyn’s Dunbar is a salvific story of familial breakdown animated by decadently wicked rich people on the one hand and the fragile optimism generated by expensive psychotherapy on the other… St Aubyn, the laureate of upper-class depravity and brittle recuperation, is the perfect author for a waspish, satirical take on King Lear’s family melodrama… Dunbar does not take up the challenge of redrawing the play’s gender politics. St Aubyn produces a deftly understated Dover Cliff sequence and avoids the hyperbole of Gloucester’s blinding, domesticating the play’s sublime into an insidiously sardonic depiction of depraved twenty-first-century glamour

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny… Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise

The tale is the perfect vehicle for what this author does best, which is to expose repellent, privileged people and their hollow dynasties in stellar prose.

St. Aubyn’s resplendent rendering of nature’s grand drama and Dunbar’s shattered psyche, Florence’s love, and her sisters’ malevolence make for a stylish, embroiling, and acid tragedy.

Hugely satisfying. Sensitive and sorrowful, it is also fast paced, sassy, and very funny... Another fruitful pursuit from the worthwhile Hogarth enterprise.

A psychologically acute look at power, dispossession and the ravages of old age... Caustically funny and full of fury, this is a devastating look at a family meltdown

Darkly comic… The intertextual prompts are nimble, and Dunbar’s painful wanderings through the snow re-enact something of the heath… An ambitious “take” on Shakespeare’s greatest play

This study of a modern, materialistic society and blood relationships, at once witty and devastating, is the perfect reading over any family Christmas.

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.

From the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, now a major Sky Atlantic television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch 
 
Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. 
 
 Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. Who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?

Parallel Lines

The story of a group of wildly different people whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked, the new novel from the bestselling and prize-winning author. 
 It is summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling, again, with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him as a child. 
 His therapist, Martin, is also facing challenges, including his adopted daughter’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother – a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily close to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis, and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of rewilding the world. 
 Over the course of the next year, their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvellous new light. 
 Written with Edward St Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style, Parallel Lines is a story about connection, love and the cascading consequences of our choices at every stage of life. It is a thrilling, wondrous novel from one of our most gifted writers.

A celebration of the best things in life… St Aubyn’s reinvention as a writer is heroic and astonishing

Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation

It is summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling, again, with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him as a child. 
 
His therapist, Martin, is also facing challenges, including his adopted daughter’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother – a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily close to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis, and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of rewilding the world. 
 
Over the course of the next year, their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvellous new light. 
 
Written with Edward St Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style, Parallel Lines is a story about connection, love and the cascading consequences of our choices at every stage of life. It is a thrilling, wondrous novel from one of our most gifted writers.

Edward St Aubyn

'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

Edward St Aubyn

Double Blind

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