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 an uncannily familiar young woman purchases the last pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa soon begins a journey across Europe, on the run from her talent and her history, shadowed by the elusive woman with 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.
About the Author
Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of numerous books, including the essay 'Things I Don't Want to Know'and the early novels Swallowing Geography and Beautiful Mutants. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Industry Reviews
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
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
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
Playful inquisitiveness and lush descriptions balance out a bassline of melancholy . . . Nobody does enigmatic like Levy
Mail on Sunday
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
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