Dunbar: Aubyn, Edward St - Hardcover

St Aubyn, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781090386 ISBN 13: 9781781090381

Publisher: Hogarth, 2017

Synopsis

‘I really did have an empire, you know,’ said Dunbar. ‘Have I ever told you the story of how it was stolen from me?’

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the family firm to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him doubting the wisdom of past decisions...

Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?

Edward St Aubyn is renowned for his masterwork, the five Melrose novels, which dissect with savage and beautiful precision the agonies of family life. Dunbar is a devastating family story and an excoriating novel for and of our times – an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

About this title

Review

"St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat... His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect" (The Times)

"Malevolently enjoyable... A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty" (Financial Times)

"Deeply affecting...and funny" (Observer)

"Powerful... Entertaining" (Spectator)

"Of all the novelist and play matches in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, that of Edward St Aubyn with King Lear seems the finest. Shakespeare’s blackest, most surreal and hectic tragedy sharpened by one of our blackest, more surreal and hectic wits... It's an enticing prospect... His Lear is Henry Dunbar, the head of an international media corporation – like Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch – and is brilliantly awful... The other characters, even minor ones, are also wittily and cleverly updated" (Kate Clanchy Guardian)

"He is an inspired choice to retell King Lear for Hogarth Shakespeare’s anniversary series. Dunbar emerges as one of the finest contributions in a line-up glittering with literary stars...He has transplanted the heart of the story into the present and made it feel remarkably authentic" (Stephanie Merritt Observer)

"A piercing portrait of existential agony... savagely acute" (Anthony Cummins Daily Mail)

"Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption... An Aubynesque simile can brighten a grey passage... Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining" (Patrick Skene Catling Spectator)

"St Aubyn is excellent on the characters’ psychology... powerful and moving" (Anthony Gardner Mail on Sunday)

"Malevolently enjoyable... The scenes that feel most real, interestingly, are those that are most fantastical, when we are drawn inside the chaos of Dunbar’s unravelling mind... Here the language feels sculpted and precise, Dunbar’s obsessive solipsism both violent and convincing... St Aubyn’s talent for brittle one-liners is as lethal as ever" (Andrew Dickson Financial Times)

Book Description

A novel of our times: despotism, finance and family clash in Edward St Aubyn’s savage and heartbreaking new novel

About this edition

• Publisher: Hogarth
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1781090386
• ISBN 13: 9781781090381
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224