August Blue

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

At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.

Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases 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 a journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who bought the dancing horses.

A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.




Sunday Times bestseller, May 2023

Review

Intelligent and absurd, precise and dream-like . . . I know of few other authors who can capture an atmosphere of the eerie and the bizarre as well as she does ― The Scotsman

August Blue holds the remarkable balancing act that is key to Levy's writing: perfect precision at the sentence level combined with a dedication to exploring the slipperiness of reality ― iNews

Playful inquisitiveness and lush descriptions balance out a bassline of melancholy . . . Nobody does enigmatic like Levy ― Mail on Sunday

[Levy] can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page. A recurring call and response between Elsa and her alter ego becomes a musical refrain that takes on ever new colors. Those familiar references to swimming and bees glint through like leitmotifs -- Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim ― New York Times

A gleeful read . . . [Deborah Levy's] prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt . . . You know you'll read August Blue again -- M John Harrison ― Guardian

Levy's lyrical, pitch-perfect prose, where every word is weighted with significance, is an exploration of our reasons for living, the forces that drive us and the inner music that controls the rhythms of our dance through life and love ― Independent

This is a stunner ― Publishers Weekly

Deborah Levy's work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve -- Charlotte Higgins ― Guardian

August Blue is Levy's eighth novel, and since her 20s, she has been refining her ability to evoke feeling through writing rather than to narrate it. Her work is deeply influenced by art forms that express the embodied experience, like cinema and dance . . . Levy's writing is psychologically complex -- Simran Hans ― New York Times

[An] enigmatic novel . . . Deborah Levy's writing is rather like Philip Glass's music . . . mesmerising . . . enigmatic . . . refreshingly original -- Amber Medland ― Daily Telegraph

[A] wistful, fabular new novel . . . Since the 1990s, Deborah Levy's novels have combined a gauzy, episodic quality with pinpoint sensual detail drawn from peripatetic lives, crossing fluently between languages and national borders. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack . . . The narrative here has a fittingly musical quality, running forward in spurts, pausing, repeating key phrases -- Olivia Laing ― Observer

About the Author

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.