August Blue by Deborah Levy

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? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching.

At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson—former child prodigy, now in her thirties—walks off the stage in Vienna, midperformance.

Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.

So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy’s August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make 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.

Author Residence: London, England