The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Double Blind

Double Blind

Summary

'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

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

About the author

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 étranger 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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more