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The best audiobooks of 2021

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

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Exploring symbiosis and psychedelics: Merlin Sheldrake meets Edward St Aubyn

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

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.

'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

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.

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?

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

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

Edward St Aubyn

Praise for Parallel Lines

I love 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

I love 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

I love 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

Books by Edward St Aubyn

Series by Edward St Aubyn

Vintage Classics Shakespeare Series

Articles featuring Edward St Aubyn

The best audiobooks of 2021

Exploring symbiosis and psychedelics: Merlin Sheldrake meets Edward St Aubyn

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