Edward St. Aubyn | DOUBLE BLIND

Olivia is a talented geneticist with a personal stake in her field. She thinks deeply about who she is and why -- more deeply than many, perhaps, because her parents, both respected psychoanalysts, adopted her as a baby. The fate of her twin birth-brother is unknown. When Olivia meets Francis, a young naturalist rewilding a corner of Sussex, and is reunited with her best friend Lucy, recently returned from a high-flying career in New York, her life expands in exciting and disorienting ways. But just as Olivia is daring to fall in love, Lucy receives devastating news which requires her friends to become her family. At the same time, Olivia's father has started to treat a struggling, clever man of his daughter's age whose story sets off unnerving echoes, ethical dilemmas, and the possibility of a shattering encounter . . . Moving from London to Provence to California and back to a beautiful woodland entirely off the grid, Double Blind is a breathtaking, kaleidoscopic novel exploring friendship, love, consciousness and the natural world, and pushing against many of the received orthodoxies of popular science. It is about nature, nurture, enquiry, perception, and the myriad ways we try to understand what it means to be alive.