August Blue
A Novel
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher 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? 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Poet, playwright, and novelist Deborah Levy leans into the full range of her talents in this lyrical portrait of a woman struggling to find—and maintain—her fragile identity. When Elsa, a famed concert pianist, suffers a very public anxiety attack, both her career and her few intimate relationships go off the rails. Set adrift during the COVID pandemic, Elsa travels across Europe, teaching piano to children of wealthy digital nomads and tracking the movements of a mysterious doppelgänger who reappears whenever Elsa feels especially unmoored. August Blue is an enigmatic and powerful meditation on loss, family, and what it means to be an artist in a time of chaos.
