Parallel Lines: A Novel

by Edward St. Aubyn Narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Edward St. Aubyn's clever follow-up to his introspective novel, Double Blind, delivers a fascinating mix of vulnerable and philosophical character stories with stream of consciousness writing and deliciously witty prose.

From the bestselling and award-winning author of the Patrick Melrose novels, a hilarious and moving story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked-a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss, written with St. Aubyn's trademark wit and inimitable style

It's the summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the biological mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is facing challenges of his own, including his adopted daughter's tenuous relationship with her own biological mother-a predicament that makes Sebastian's struggle feel uncannily proximate to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on catastrophic natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend, Lucy, faces a grave diagnosis, and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of re-wilding the world. Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvelous new light.

With characteristic brilliance and humor, Parallel Lines investigates themes of dualism, determinism, connection, and love. St. Aubyn captures the life of the spirit as vibrantly as the life of the mind, in a novel that wrestles with moral and psychic anguish and the cascading consequences of our choices at every stage of life. A thrilling, wholly captivating novel from one of the most gifted writers at work today.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Mr. St. Aubyn’s ravenous curiosity about the quandaries of existence makes his intellectual investigations feel vital and exciting.” —The Wall Street Journal

“St. Aubyn is worth reading, nearly all the time, because his novels contain brutal and funny intellectual content. He’s a briny writer, one who dispatches a stream of salty commentary, sentences that whoosh past like arrows. . . . St. Aubyn’s talents are mighty.” —The New York Times

"“Intellectually roving. . . . Real humans—wounded, flawed and often beautiful—stand behind, and sometimes place themselves in the way of, the ideas the novel confronts.” —The Washington Post

“An elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn’s best work yet.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“From suicide observation room to cutting-edge art installation, Parallel Lines plots quite the journey. . . . In a lesser writer the temptations of sentimentality would get the upper hand, but St. Aubyn is clear-sighted and humane on the basic requirement of life.” —The Guardian

“Brimming with wordplay. . . . The novel bristles with ideas. . . . St. Aubyn is at his best in comic set pieces, which recall the brilliance of the Patrick Melrose quintet.” —Financial Times

“A novel rich in characters and perspectives. . . . [Parallel Lines] doesn't disappoint." —Evening Standard

“Mordan humour abounds.” ­—The Telegraph

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2025-04-19
A hurtling ride through the world’s collapse.

Continuing a storyline begun inDouble Blind (2021), St. Aubyn’s latest opens with a view through the window of an onrushing train—a metaphor that will appear frequently—where Sebastian, an eminently sensitive young man, feels “the gaping wounds” of the English countryside. Sebastian is being treated, without much success, for schizophrenia and is certainly not prepared for the surprise that his doctor will reveal about his past. Sebastian’s twin, Olivia, is busily married and mothering, having grown up as an adoptee apart from him. Olivia has found work writing radio scripts on the unfolding sixth extinction, with “artificial intelligence, pandemics, nuclear annihilation, global warming, asteroids and overpopulation” among her unhappy subjects. Olivia’s tale entwines with that of the mogul Hunter Sterling, now the partner of Lucy, the center of the previous novel, both of them having retreated from the world after Hunter’s sale of a startup to “a Silicon Valley amortality company, which exploited the fear of death by offering to download its customers’ consciousness onto a ‘non-biological substrate.’” St. Aubyn’s piece makes a neat companion to David Mitchell’sCloud Atlas in depicting harried people constantly on the run, on the make, and at the end of their tethers in a time of crumbling civilizations—in which, pointedly, the “current batch of the super-rich” who want to “piss off to Mars or swap Europe for Europa” are savaged as a class and a few world leaders (“I due amici, Putin and Trump”) are lampooned by name, all with great good slashingly sarcastic humor. St. Aubyn’s closing, which leaves room for another episode, is quite sincere, though, and even affecting in recounting Sebastian and Olivia’s tentative efforts to form not just a relationship but a family, the only bastion against doom.

An elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn’s best work yet.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193368533
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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