August Blue

The mesmerizing new novel from the author of “Hot Milk” and “Swimming Home.”

If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching.

At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson-former child prodigy, now in her thirties-walks off the stage in Vienna, midperformance.

Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase 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 her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy's “August Blue” uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.