August Blue

Description

“[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.Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, Vulture, The Guardian, BBC, The Week, and Publisher’s Weekly

One of
Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”
TIME’s “Must-Read Books of 2023″

Praise for 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. A recurring call and response between Elsa and her alter ego becomes a musical refrain that takes on ever new colors.”
—The New York Times

“This meditative novel starts at a flea market in Athens, where a pianist named Elsa, who recently interrupted her career after a disastrous concert, catches sight of a woman who seems to be her double. . . . As the novel quickens to a climactic encounter between Elsa and her doppelgänger, it becomes a rumination on identity, desire, and the passage from self-effacement to self-discovery.”
―The New Yorker

“Deborah Levy’s hazy, dreamlike novels, often set in sun-drenched Mediterranean backdrops, are an essential accompaniment to any summer holiday . . . [August Blue is] a lyrical, surreal trip of self-discovery—one that is full of Levy’s wit and curious images.”
—Leila Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny

“[Levy] imparts her intimately realistic world with uncanny touches that never ring false. . . . It’s a striking idea: that freedom is to be found not by pursuing the self but by shedding it. But isn’t that what we did as we shed the isolation of pandemic shutdowns and exchanged stillness for movement? There are many ways to tell that story, but Elsa’s journey is a nuanced and psychologically thrilling composition.
―Los Angeles Times

“[August Blue] encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art―and the ambiguities of human relations. . . . Her books―like love, and indeed, life―require, as a friend points out to Elsa in a wry aside about relationships, a willingness to tolerate a certain level of ‘confusion and uncertainty.’ They are totally worth it.”
―The Wall Street Journal

“Levy makes a metaphor of twinhood and doppelgangers to illustrate our alternate lives, she recycles phrases throughout the book in a kind of prayer of repetition, and she leaves us with absences, and gifts, and mirrors. It’s a lovely and spare portrayal of coming to terms with the truth of our lives, our specific oneness.”
―Literary Hub

“In Levy’s characteristically sharp, spare prose, the uncanny doubling of the women and their continental journeys makes for a disorienting, propulsive read.”
―Vulture

“[Deborah Levy’s] 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. . . . The wistful, fabular quality is appealing, as are those aphoristic statements Levy is so skilled at dispensing: sly comments on contemporary power dynamics likewise in the process of changing into new and as yet uncertain forms.”
―The Guardian

“[A] magnificent experiment in surrealism. . . . This is a stunner.”
―Publisher’s Weekly (starred)

“An economical, elliptical, but always entertaining novel of transformation by a highly skilled enigmatist.”
―Kirkus Reviews

“At this stage, we’re all in on anything new Deborah Levy writes. Her work encompasses surreal fiction, candid memoir, and formally inventive prose; August Blue is her latest book, a novel about a piano player faced with a crossroads in her life.”
―Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“[August Blue] is another slender, elegant, sparse novel that belies depths.”
―The Chicago Tribune

“Levy’s slender, enchanted novel August Blue has all the piercing detail and bewildering movement of a midafternoon dream. . . . In addition to being a novelist, Levy is also a poet. Her storytelling moves to its own music. Her sentences are sharp, sensuous, crackling with ironic humor. Her paragraphs are compact, full of tension that pulls the reader forward. The novel offers the reader a dazzling gaze at the conundrums of existence.”
—BookPage (starred)

“A new book from Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy is always a joy to see, and August Blue lives up to the hype. . . . Part travel novel and part portrait of melancholy, Levy’s latest is a spectacular ride that is guaranteed to be the perfect accompaniment for your summer plans.”
―Chicago Review of Books

“Deborah Levy’s prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt. . . . Everything is a metaphor for something else, a clue to some other event, and that’s what makes this such a gleeful read. You know you’ve picked up only a fraction of what Levy has left for you to find; you know you’ll read August Blue again. At the same time, you’re forced to concede that once again she’s made you feel more, perhaps, than you wanted.”
―The Guardian (UK)

“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.”
―The Independent (UK)

“A refreshingly original take on what we’ve come to expect from the ‘pandemic novel’. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . [August Blue] is full of patterns, motifs, and double-acts: interfering parents and prodigal children; experimental artists; colourful liquors.”
―The Telegraph (UK)

“Reading August Blue feels like playing a game. Nothing finds its way into a Deborah Levy novel without a reason, but those reasons are rarely obvious. Can you trace the clues she leaves, like breadcrumbs through the woods? . . . Levy builds her worlds as though concocting a dream sequence―and the effect is exhilarating. . . . 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.”
―The I (UK)

“A work of scathing intelligence. . . . Deborah Levy writes like a dream and I mean that quite literally. I know of few other authors who can capture an atmosphere of the eerie and the bizarre as well as she does. Her novels have a strange clarity and precision about being nebulous and shifting, and there are details, just as in a vivid dream―here, they would include sea urchins, tomatillos, buckles, Isadora Duncan and a golden cigarette lighter, but what they mean is elusive and evasive. That perhaps is key: as in dreams, meaning is always just out of reach. It makes Levy’s work far more true to reality than any kind of stodgy realism.”
―The Scotsman (UK)

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

“[An] enigmatic novel. . . . Deborah Levy’s writing is rather like Philip Glass’s music . . . mesmerizing . . . refreshingly original.”
―Daily Telegraph (UK)

“[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.”
—Observer (UK)

“A meditation on artistic creativity that is sensual, enigmatic, and strangely addictive.”
―Financial Times (UK)

“Levy’s newest addition to her strange, enigmatic collection of fiction is a hazy mystery, interspersed with details that play with form that makes Levy one of the most exciting writers today. Elsa’s story is one of identity, past selves, alter egos and shadows that haunt us all.”
―Spectrum Culture (UK)

“Deborah Levy is no stranger to the uncanny. Her novels teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes. . . . Angst and profound loss shape the lives of her protagonists. . . . This is not a long book, but Levy is such a clever writer, her plot so immaculately packed, that August Blue reads like a weighty one. . . . The latest novel is about death and loss, and what happens when those closest to us die. We see them everywhere, in shadows, in strangers, in visions in the dark. When they have gone we cannot help but wonder who they really were. Without them we question, too, who we really are.”
―Times Literary Supplement (UK)
 
“Levy takes us on a mesmerising journey across Europe when classical pianist Elsa stumbles upon her double in an Athens flea market, setting them both on a search for identity.”
—BBC

“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.”
—Sheerluxe

“[August Blue is] a beguiling, puzzling, finely layered piece of work.”
—ABC (Australia)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.US

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