Double Blind, Edward St. Aubyn
Double Blind, Edward St. Aubyn
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Double Blind
A Novel

Author: Edward St. Aubyn

Narrator: Benedict Cumberbatch

Unabridged: 7 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/01/2021


Synopsis

"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

About Edward St. Aubyn

Edward St. Aubyn was born in London. His acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (winner of the Prix Femina étranger and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and At Last. The series was made into a BAFTA Award–winning Sky Atlantic TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. St. Aubyn is also the author of A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge (short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Lost for Words (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), and Dunbar, his reimagining of King Lear for the Hogarth Shakespeare project.

About Benedict Cumberbatch

Academy Award Nominee Benedict Cumberbatch is known for playing Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, a role that has earned him international acclaim and several awards, including a Primetime Emmy. In 2015, Benedict portrayed Alan Turing in the multi-award-winning film The Imitation Game, which earned him a BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Academy Award nomination as Best Actor. Benedict joined the Marvel Universe as the titular character in 2016’s Doctor Strange, a role he reprised in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. More recently, Benedict’s performance in David Nicholls’s adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s beloved Patrick Melrose has earned him a BAFTA for Best Actor and Emmy and Golden Globe Best Actor nominations.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer on April 14, 2025

'What about twin studies?' said Hunter. 'Aren't they the gold standard for a lot of this genetic analysis?' `They're often treated that way,' said Olivia, 'but lots of clinical psychologists, like my brother Charlie, question the Equal Environment Assumption on which they rest. They attribute out......more

Goodreads review by Meike on March 12, 2021

St. Aubyn knows how to portray social spheres and their signifiers, and how to evoke atmosphere and bring settings to life. Still, this novel about family and genes, nature and nurture, neuroscience and social circumstances tends to get lost in its own ideas while remaining less immersive than it co......more

Goodreads review by Sam on April 30, 2021

Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel Double Blind doesn’t really have a story per se, you’re just introduced to a group of compelling characters at interesting points in their lives and follow them for the duration of the book. It’s about human relationships and science and the pursuit of the next technol......more

Goodreads review by PattyMacDotComma on December 08, 2021

DNF 2★ “When the human genome had been sequenced, it turned out to contain twenty-three thousand genes, about the same as a sea urchin’s, but drastically fewer than the forty thousand in rice.” OK, I didn’t finish this, so what’s with the two stars? Well, I read, thoroughly, the first third, and there......more

Goodreads review by Doug on March 31, 2025

Update: 3/30/2025 So I had a bit of an odd experience - I luckily scored an ARC of St. Aubyn's new novel, Parallel Lines and began to read it and got about 10% in - but I felt I wasn't catching some things or that information was somehow missing. So I went back to the beginning and read to 17% - and......more