August Blue cover art

August Blue

Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

August Blue

By: Deborah Levy
Narrated by: Alix Dunmore
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $16.99

Buy Now for $16.99

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.'

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?

Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.

Praise for Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography'

'Her reflections on domesticity, freedom and romance are so beautiful, I found myself underlining multiple sentences a page. Wry, warm and uplifting, it's a book I'll return to again and again' Stylist

'[Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing' Financial Times

©2023 Deborah Levy (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction Fiction

Critic Reviews

Intelligent and absurd, precise and dream-like . . . I know of few other authors who can capture an atmosphere of the eerie and the bizarre as well as she does
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
Playful inquisitiveness and lush descriptions balance out a bassline of melancholy . . . Nobody does enigmatic like Levy
[Levy] 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. Those familiar references to swimming and bees glint through like leitmotifs (Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim)
A gleeful read . . . [Deborah Levy's] prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt . . . You know you'll read August Blue again (M John Harrison)
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
This is a stunner
Deborah Levy's work inspires a devotion few literary authors ever achieve (Charlotte Higgins)
August Blue is Levy's eighth novel, and since her 20s, she has been refining her ability to evoke feeling through writing rather than to narrate it. Her work is deeply influenced by art forms that express the embodied experience, like cinema and dance . . . Levy's writing is psychologically complex (Simran Hans)
[An] enigmatic novel . . . Deborah Levy's writing is rather like Philip Glass's music . . . mesmerising . . . enigmatic . . . refreshingly original (Amber Medland)
All stars
Most relevant
I love Deborah Levy’s rich evocative hypnotic use of language to give voice to an inner experience that touched into something ephemeral and important and beautiful.

Rich

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I loved this book. An intriguing plot, unusual characters and all presented in the most beautiful language. I couldn’t put it down.

Hypnotic

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Have listened multiple times & read the hard copy . Love this as much as Hot Milk .

Brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.