DOUBLE BLIND

Brought to you by Penguin. From the author of the internationally acclaimed Patrick Melrose books: a major new novel exploring some of the biggest ideas and most pressing questions of our times. 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 re-wilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is as compelling about ecology, psychoanalysis, genetics and neuroscience as it is about love, fear and courage. When Olivia meets a new lover, Francis, just as she is welcoming her dearest friend, Lucy, back from New York, her life expands precipitously. Her connection to Francis, a committed naturalist living off-grid, is immediate and startling. Eager to involve Lucy in her joy, Olivia introduces the two - but Lucy has 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, Double Blind investigates themes of inheritance, determinism, freedom, consciousness and the stories we tell about ourselves. 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.