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

Podcast20website20article.jpg

Interviews

Exploring symbiosis and psychedelics: Merlin Sheldrake meets Edward St Aubyn

Dunbar

King Lear, Retold

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.

Shakespeare’s King Lear is reimagined in Edward St Aubyn's gripping story of a media mogul who has lost control. 
 
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? 
 
‘Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty’ Financial Times 
 
‘Deeply affecting…and funny’ Observer 
 
SHAKESPEARE RETOLD: Time travel. Zombies. Power-hungry media moguls. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before: nine iconic plays transformed by the best novelists of our time, with covers by Michael Craig-Martin.

Double Blind

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

This is the best kind of novel of ideas, as entertaining as it is chewy, not to mention immensely pleasurable on the sentence level

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

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.

Both moving and so funny I had to stop every few pages to wipe tears from my eyes

As an addict of Edward St Aubyn's crystalline prose, I devoured Double Blind, a typically audacious blend of big themes

'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

Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation

A compassionate book… St Aubyn can express things you always knew but had never had the words for

St Aubyn’s writing is as astute as ever. A coincidence-driven comedy of errors… Glinting with hard-won wisdom lightly worn

The Patrick Melrose author brings his trademark dark wit and flinty compassion to this wide-ranging sequel… St Aubyn is clear-sighted and humane on the basic requirement of life: ‘Compassion is just love in the face of suffering and love does not run out with use – it grows stronger’

It is a novel rich in characters and perspectives… The story whips along… All the while, Parallel Lines is building towards a showdown that threatens to break its characters and their values. It doesn’t disappoint

A state-of-the-nation novel that brilliantly uses the conventions of farce, satire and social critique to evoke a nation drifting indifferently into chaos… St Aubyn’s portrait of the family and its sharp-edged sketches of various institutions of British life are often very, very funny and always penetrating; but they are also at times moving, especially when they relate to mental health… [Parallel Lines] has formal verve and political vitality

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Judges, 2025

St Aubyn remains a terrific writer… [Parallel Lines] is genuinely affecting

A tale of analysis, art and family dysfunction… In a novel brimming with wordplay, Sebastian’s eagerness to make meaningful connections is affecting

Parallel Lines is entertaining, tidily put together and…sparklingly well written

St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat

St Aubyn’s ravenous curiosity about the quandaries of existence makes his 
intellectual investigations feel vital and exciting . . . Equally as stimulating is his hunger for goodness

Tenuous relationships and grave predicaments serve as the connective tissue in St. Aubyn’s latest novel, which follows an overlapping cast of characters dealing with childhood trauma, climate catastrophe and a life-threatening diagnosis over the course of a year

Nothing can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn’s world

Parallel Lines depicts characters whose hold on reality is fragile or fraught, but this novel’s hold on reality is sure and convincing and passionate… [It is] dressmaker-deft on adult sibling relationships, on patient-therapist challenges, on the surprises of middle-age, on the pressure to accept our circumstances

CAOILINN HUGHES, author of The Wild Laughter

Witty, rich and provocative. One ravishingly elegant sentence follows another as the stories of these fascinating characters intertwine en route to a poignant and uplifting conclusion. Masterful

BEN HINSHAW, author of Exactly What You Mean

Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St Aubyn?

A hurtling ride through the world’s collapse… St Aubyn’s piece makes a neat companion to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in depicting harried people constantly on the run, on the make, and at the end of their tethers in a time of crumbling civilizations… Some of St Aubyn’s best work yet

St Aubyn shows himself, once again, to be a shrewd and distinctive voice in contemporary fiction

An incredibly well written social commentary, carried by the dark wit of Edward St Aubyn… It’s a brilliant and entertaining story

St Aubyn is as caustically clever as ever

[A] subtly seditious tour of contemporary anxieties and its therapies, those non-identical twins forever seeking each other out in the perpetual dark

Parallel Lines is bursting with characters and ideas . . . Real humans – wounded, flawed and often beautiful – stand behind, and sometimes place themselves in the way of, the ideas the novel confronts

St Aubyn is worth reading, nearly all the time, because his novels contain brutal and funny intellectual content. He’s a briny writer, one who dispatches a stream of salty commentary, sentences that whoosh past like arrows . . . St Aubyn’s talents are mighty

A brother and sister lost and found, in a novel that seizes your heart and enthrals your mind, from the author of the Patrick Melrose series. 
 
‘Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation’ Alan Hollinghurst 
 
‘We set off in opposite directions and walked around the world until we met, and I’m very pleased we have…’ 
 
Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him. His therapist, Martin, also faces challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother. Olivia, meanwhile, is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life. 
 
Over a year, their fates collide and each of their destinies is revealed in a marvellous new light. 
 
‘A tale of art and family…brimming with wordplay’ Financial Times 
 
‘Sentences that whoosh past like arrows… St Aubyn’s talents are mighty’ New York Times 
 
‘I love Edward St Aubyn’ Donna Tartt

Edward St Aubyn

Books by Edward St Aubyn

Articles featuring Edward St Aubyn

Exploring symbiosis and psychedelics: Merlin Sheldrake meets Edward St Aubyn

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter