August Blue

Description

The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home

If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?

Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.DEBORAH LEVY is the author of seven novels: Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home, Hot Milk, and The Man Who Saw Everything. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O’Connor Short Story Award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatizations of Freud’s iconic case studies, Dora and The Wolfman. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and her pioneering theatre writing is collected in Levy: Plays 1. Her work is widely translated. Levy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also the author of a formally innovative and emotionally daring trilogy of memoirs, a “living autobiography” on writing, gender politics and philosophy, of which Real Estate is the final volume. The first two volumes, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, won the Prix Femina Etranger 2020.CA