Dunbar

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Review ------ "St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat… His prose has an easy charm that s a ferocious, searching intellect" (The Times) "Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of herly 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 transed 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) About the Author ---------------- Edward St Aubyn was born in London. His superbly accled Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, which won a Betty Trask Award, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, which won the Prix Femina étranger and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and At Last. He is also the author of the novels A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and Lost for Words, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.