Description
Author Deborah Levy joins us to discuss her astounding novel August Blue.
August Blue is Deborah Levy’s eighth novel, and it’s a masterpiece – eerie, atmospheric, inquisitive and full of haunting imagery and ideas.
The book follows concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson who, at the height of her career walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. We see her later 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.
This is a dazzling read, one to linger over and think deeply about and we can’t wait to hear more.
Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, 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 she won the Prix Femina Etranger in 2020. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Brian Dillon join us to interview Deborah. His books include Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum.
Ticket price includes a glass of wine or a soft drink.