Edward St. Aubyn's choice of DOUBLE BLIND as a title for his new novel invited me into the quasi fantastical world the author creates so well. The book reminded me, at times, of Patrick Melrose. There are loads of drugs for the super-rich juxtaposed with returning the land to its original state using wilding. I liked Olivia, the daughter of two psycho-analysts. She presents a kind persona as well as brilliance at her work in scientific writing. Francis, her newest love, works in the countryside, observing the wilding taking place on an estate that allows nature to win against technology.

Olivia's dearest friend Lucie completes the lovely group of people. Double blind enters the narrative in various ways, both literally and metaphorically. One can choose to participate in experimental studies with the hope that one doesn't get the placebo. It seems that the double-edged sword also comes into play in life. Will my love be faithful to me, and can that love guarantee a successful outcome?

I enjoyed the travels St. Aubyn took me on this trip from England's countryside to majestic hideaways on the California coast. The cast includes ordinary people grinding away at trying to live a life worth having and corporate titans trying to change how we live with inventions that will make them richer and mightier.

I loved the slight brush with the Patrick Melrose novels and hope to read more from this brilliant author again soon. I left the story with the highest hope for Olivia and Lucy.

Thank you to the publisher via NetGalley for this e-ARC.

*special thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC copy in exchange for an honest review!

3 stars
This is a very thought provoking novel, but it almost felt like too much.
There was a lot to like about this book. It covers a lot of topics, and there was clearly a lot of thought put there.
We also get to meet a lot of characters and visit lots of different locations.

At the same time however, it felt like a lot of thrown at the reader and it was a lot to juggle.
There would be longer ramblings and I found myself zoning out and not being able to keep focus.
And if you can’t tell by my over usage of the words “a lot”, it was a LOT.
It’s definitely not a light read, but it was interesting at times.

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 could be. We meet thirtysomething Lucy, who works for venture capitalist and hobby philanthropist Hunter, a tycoon fascinated by the possibilities of brain science. As Lucy gets diagnosed with a brain tumor, her old friend Olivia tries to support her as much as she can, and the same goes for Olivia's new boyfriend Francis, a conservationist, as well as Olivia's adoptive parents who are psychologists. You guessed it: All these paths cross, there also is a lost twin, mental illness and a new baby, and readers get a tale to contemplate questions of psychology and biology.

So the set-up and the contrasting characters are well thought out, but unfortunately, the book remains a little bloodless. The story meanders on, and while many vignettes and observations are spot-on, smart and pristine, the story lacks narrative discipline, it grows wildly like Francis' nature reserve which bears the risk of readers getting lost in the thick foliage. Also, there are a lot of hints to Germany and German music, but the German writing this review did not quite get the point.

St. Aubyn is a great writer with great ideas, but this novel fell a little short. Still, I can't wait to read his next effort.

This is a comedy of manners and a novel of ideas. It ranges from nature writing to the brain/mind dichotomy, to cosmology. It also contains brilliant satire of megalomaniacal billionaires,Vatican hierarchy, and psychiatry and more.There is a wonderful cast of characters most of whom come be the main characters of their own novels.
It was a great deal of fun while also thought provoking and ends on a cautiously optimistic note.
This book was a respite from the many books out there that actively insult ones intelligence or are blog posts puffed up to book length..
Five stars all the way.

Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for this ARC.

DOUBLE BLIND investigates the worlds of inheritance, biology, and intellectual curiosity through the eyes of primarily three individuals. Francis is a naturalist who lives off the grid on a wilding project. He meets Olivia, a fellow biologist at a conference and they have an immediate connection. Lucy is a close friend of Olivia's who moves from the US back to London to take a new job under Hunter Sterling who gives the reader Elon Musk-vibes. The catalyst for the plot is Lucy receives unexpected medical news which brings her closer to both Francis and Olivia, and the plot follows them over the course of about a year. Additional side characters we learn about and are brought into the picture are Olivia's parents who are psychoanalysts, a patient of Olivia's father names Sebastian who has schizophrenia, and a free-spirit named Hope who entices Francis.

One can tell that St. Aubyn did his research on a vast array of areas for this book- mental illness, DNA, genetic inheritance, psychoanalysis, transcranial stimulation, etc. At times it is all a bit much, because it can be a bit of an information dump. In addition to all of the research, Francis in particular will go on rather long observations about nature that I got a bit lost in. I did appreciate the interesting discussions around the placebo effect. In a double blind (I see what St. Aubyn did there) study, the participant does not know if s/he has received the drug or not, and a large number of individuals receiving the placebo still exhibit benefits. It's a deception, but who cares if it works, as one character asks.

On an unrelated note to the book's contents, the cover is gorgeous and really does a nice job of highlighting the overarching theme of nature that pervades this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for providing me with an advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.

How is it that Edward St. Aubyn can write so confidently about so many deep and disparate subjects. In this ambitious exploration of the effect of business on science, he presents three central characters, Olivia, Lucy and Francis, and those that comprise the world around them, all with agendas and situations exposing ills of today's world minus the pandemic. For the deliciously named Hunter Sterling acquisition is all, never mind what effect it has, but as he becomes less coked up and "less fun," he does show signs of humanity. And he is not even one of the major characters. But all these characters illustrate matters relating to climate change, dna research, schizophrenia (and to a lesser extent, bipolar disorder), cancer, among others. Which is a long way of saying that for a relatively short book, Double Blind covers a lot of territory.

However, for me, there is a weakness here -- the timing of this engrossing novel's publication cannot be ignored as it seems to be set in an alternative present, one that would exist if there weren't a worldwide lockdown. Since the book is so strong, my mind kept going back to that fact and wondering what St. Aubyn would have written if he had incorporated today's realities in his book.

I loved the characters so much. My mind is still spinning from this book! Thank you for the advanced copy. Also, the cover art is beautiful.

I am a huge fan of Edward St. Aubyn, and I was ecstatic to receive an ARC of his latest book, Double Blind. I breezed through it pretty quickly, and there’s a lot to love about it. St. Aubyn’s prose is absolutely gorgeous, and while this one isn’t as funny as Lost for Words he still imbues it with a healthy amount of wry wit. There were some elements I didn’t like, such as the plot thread dealing with the “Happy Helmets,” which felt clumsy to me, as does a lot of contemporary fiction that tries to grapple with the tech industry. Overall, however, it was a highly enjoyable read and one I’d readily recommend.

Rather than placing a single person at the center of this novel, St. Aubyn gives equal attention to a smattering of characters, interacting in a smattering of locations. The diversity of its plot threads and settings, as well as its tone, reminded me of Jennifer’s Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad or last year’s The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel. Any novel with half a dozen significant characters sets itself up to be a relationship study, and Double Blind is no exception. The three characters at the center of the book, two old school friends, Lucy and Olivia, and Olivia’s boyfriend, Francis, make up the central hub from which all of these connections radiate. These relationships are numerous and quite diverse (paternal, fraternal, romantic, collegial, etc.) but the novel never felt cluttered. Each of the characters is well crafted and fits perfectly into the narrative.

It is certainly the most expansive of St. Aubyn’s works that I’ve read, but that was probably necessitated by the themes he chose to address. While the Patrick Melrose novels were a masterclass in suffering, the problems therein are largely human-inflicted: abuse, drugs, bankruptcy, infidelity. While all of these are present in Double Blind, they’re presented against the backdrop of much, much bigger problems: climate change, capitalism, cancer, fate. And while I thought that centering problems like these would result in a pretty bleak novel, especially at the hands of a cynic like St. Aubyn, the result was surprisingly hopeful. Early in the book, he says of one of the characters learning of an impending extinction that “…the scale of the crisis invited a sense of impotence equal to his sense of horror.” The author is no optimist, but I think he believes that there’s just as much grace in accepting your problems as in ending them, and knows that most people just try to do the best they can.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and the author for a copy of the ARC of "Double Blind" in exchange for an honest opinion. My mind is still spinning as if I've been on an interstellar journey and I have to find reality again. St. Aubyn is brilliant and knowledgeable about so many things. He writes of Quantum Mechanics, psychedelic drugs, climate change, schizophrenia, environmental efforts like wilding...I could go on and on.

This novel was a hybrid of scientific textbook and enchanting story of multiple characters, His language is Joycean and he plays with alliteration and poetry till your head spins. But the characters! We have Hunter, an Elon Musk-like zillionaire with multiple homes who is constantly high on coke, booze or other chemicals, his partner and idea man Saul, a couple of psychiatrists, their adopted daughter Olivia and her boyfriend Francis, Lucy (who has a brain tumor and a new job with Hunter, who falls in love with her and transforms as a result. And the unforgettable Hope Schwartz, an unbelievably sexy philanthropist who has her eye on Francis who tries to remain faithful to the pregnant Olivia.

This is not a light or easy read. You need to read it on a Kindle so that you can search definitions of many words you won't know. (And I was an English Major.) Amusements, pithy lines and surprises abound on every page.

I promise that you will learn a lot about science and enjoy the heck out of the story. Like the old commercial used to say, "It's two, two, two books in one.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This book is fantastic and packed with more ideas and humor than books twice its length. Over the course of a year we follow college friends Lucy and Olivia as they reunite in London in their mid thirties, in what turns out to be one of the most important years of each of their lives. Olivia falls instantly in love with Francis, a naturalist who works to bring private land back to its wild origins. Lucy has a medical emergency that will effect the rest of her life as she starts a romantic relationship with her eccentric billionaire boss, Hunter, who starts the book out of control, but finds a calm in helping Lucy. Mixed into all of this are discussions and extraordinary riffs on modern day medicines, multiple forms of ecology, was of treating schizophrenic patients, adoption and seemingly a hundred other topics that are told with such intelligence and humor. A very nice book from an author I’ve been read for many years.

3.5, rounded up.

Aside from his early novel On the Edge, I've read everything St. Aubyn has published, and count his pentalogy of Patrick Melrose novels amongst my top favorites of all time. I wasn't terribly enamored of his last offering, Dunbar, the King Lear manqué he wrote as part of the modern Hogarth Shakespeare series; despite its Booker nomination, I felt he was somewhat constrained by the confines of the original. He seems to be somewhat under the same Shakespearian thrall here, as two of his major characters are Olivia and Sebastian, twins separated and adopted by different families, an obvious allusion to Twelfth Night.

As with that play, Double Blind finds the author in a more playful mood, and the exquisite, meaty, delicious and droll prose for which he's justly famous is aptly on display. Although the book reads quickly, it becomes bogged down at several points by some needlessly confusing explications of principals of physics that lost me completely. My other minor quibble is the plethora of minor underwritten characters who pop in and out, and the rather late arrival of Hope, one of his most disarming creations, of whom I'd have liked to have seen much more. There is also a dizzying array of locations that characters careen to seemingly willy-nilly, so I always had to go back to figure out where we were at any given point.

The ending also seemed a mite rushed, and although the expected (minor spoiler ahead) reunion of the aforementioned twins is satisfying, several of the balls that St Aubyn has lofted seem to remain airborne. Regardless, this is a delightful and audacious entry to the St. Aubyn canon, and my sincere appreciation to Netgalley and FS & G for the ARC, in exchange for this honest (and first on GR!) review