August Blue

“[August Blue] offers glimpses of Levy’s talent as a stylist. She can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page.” —The New York Times

A mesmerising novel on self-discovery 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, including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl, Swimming Home and Hot Milk , and two volumes of memoir, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living . Both Swimming Home and Hot Milk were shortlisted for the Man 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.Levy has written for The Royal Shakespeare Company, and her pioneering theater writing is collected in Levy: Plays 1 . Deborah Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.