Double Blind: A Novel

Written by Edward St Aubyn

Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch

"In his remarkable performance of Edward St. Aubyn's newest novel, stage and screen actor Benedict Cumberbatch proves yet again that he is a master of pacing and characterization...When not delivering a silky, warm, and beautifully enunciated narration, Cumberbatch subsumes himself into a multiplicity of male and female roles." -- AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

Double Blind follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set between London, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur, and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is about the headlong pursuit of knowledge—for the purposes of pleasure, revelation, money, sanity, or survival—and the consequences of fleeing from what we know about others and ourselves.

When Olivia meets a new lover just as she is welcoming her best friend, Lucy, back from New York, her dedicated academic life expands precipitously. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off the grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two—but Lucy has received shocking news of her own that binds the trio unusually close. Over the months that follow, Lucy’s boss, Hunter, Olivia’s psychoanalyst parents, and a young man named Sebastian are pulled into the friends’ orbit, and not one of them will emerge unchanged.

Expansive, playful, and compassionate, Edward St. Aubyn's Double Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness, and the stories we tell about ourselves. St. Aubyn's major new novel is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics, and neuroscience as it is about love, fear, and courage. Most of all, it is a perfect expression of the interconnections it sets out to examine, and a moving evocation of an imagined world that is deeply intelligent, often tender, curious, and very much alive.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250804556

Edward St Aubyn

Edward St Aubyn's superbly acclaimed Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2006) and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge, Lost for Words and Dunbar.

Reviews for Double Blind

[Surbhi KitKat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Edward St. Aubyn is simply brilliant. I love the depth of thought on topics affecting human consciousness. I will listen to Benedict Cumberbatch read from a box of cereal. He personifies the characters. The two together are superb!

[Judy Weerstra · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was very difficult to read. Author attempted to fuse faculties of mind and emotion and failed. The only way he could see to bring these together was through the use of magic mushrooms or drugs. The naturalist ended up living a divided life on a whole other level. The capitalist ended up coming closer to his beloved even though she was dying. I think it took her dying for him to change. Sebastian I think was the only one that really changed and came to his most productive self. The author himself remains divided as he told two stories on two layers: the story of the mental journeys and the stories of the physical journeys.It was confusing and to top it all off the endings were absurd.