August Blue

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

BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, TIME MAGAZINE

'Levy's lyrical, pitch-perfect prose 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

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.

'Deborah Levy writes like a dream and I mean that quite literally' Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

'A virtuosic novel of identity and breakdown . . . [it] flickers constantly between comedy and darkness. You know you'll read August Blue again' M John Harrison, Guardian

Sunday Times bestseller, May 2023

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.