Double Blind

From the author of the internationally acclaimed Patrick Melrose books: a major new novel exploring some of the biggest ideas and most pressing questions of our times.

A most-anticipated read of 2021 in the Guardian , Sunday Times , Financial Times , New Statesman , The Times and Evening Standard

‘Emotionally cogent and intellectually fascinating… I was gripped by it’ Ian McEwan

Double Blind follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set between London, Cap d’Antibes, Big Sur and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics and neuroscience as it is about love, fear and courage.

When Olivia meets a new lover, Francis, just as she is welcoming her dearest friend Lucy back from New York, her life expands precipitously. 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.

Expansive, playful and compassionate, Double Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness, and the stories we tell about ourselves. Most of all, it is a perfect expression of the interconnections it sets out to examine, and a moving evocation of an imagined world that is deeply intelligent, often tender, curious, and very much alive.

‘The experience of St Aubyn is indelible’ Jonathan Franzen
‘Extraordinary’ Sam Mendes
‘A joy’ Zadie Smith
‘Among the giants of English fiction’ Edmund White