Parallel Lines

Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat

The Times

One of our greatest prose stylists

ALICE SEBOLD

The experience of St Aubyn is indelible

JONATHAN FRANZEN

Nothing can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn’s world

ZADIE SMITH

Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St Aubyn?

BRET EASTON ELLIS

I love Edward St Aubyn

DONNA TARTT

Our purest living prose stylist

Guardian

Parallel Lines depicts characters whose hold on reality is fragile or fraught, but this novel’s hold on reality is sure and convincing and passionate… [It is] dressmaker-deft on adult sibling relationships, on patient-therapist challenges, on the surprises of middle-age, on the pressure to accept our circumstances

CAOILINN HUGHES, author of The Wild Laughter

Witty, rich and provocative. One ravishingly elegant sentence follows another as the stories of these fascinating characters intertwine en route to a poignant and uplifting conclusion. Masterful

BEN HINSHAW, author of Exactly What You Mean

A hurtling ride through the world’s collapse… St Aubyn’s piece makes a neat companion to David Mitchell’s Cloud 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… Some of St Aubyn’s best work yet

Kirkus, Starred Review

It is a novel rich in characters and perspectives… The story whips along… All the while, Parallel Lines is building towards a showdown that threatens to break its characters and their values. It doesn’t disappoint

Evening Standard

A tale of analysis, art and family dysfunction… In a novel brimming with wordplay, Sebastian’s eagerness to make meaningful connections is affecting

Financial Times

The Patrick Melrose author brings his trademark dark wit and flinty compassion to this wide-ranging sequel… St Aubyn is clear-sighted and humane on the basic requirement of life: ‘Compassion is just love in the face of suffering and love does not run out with use – it grows stronger’

Guardian

St Aubyn shows himself, once again, to be a shrewd and distinctive voice in contemporary fiction

Mail on Sunday

St Aubyn remains a terrific writer… [Parallel Lines] is genuinely affecting

i

Parallel Lines is entertaining, tidily put together and…sparklingly well written

Literary Review

A compassionate book… St Aubyn can express things you always knew but had never had the words for

The Times

St Aubyn’s writing is as astute as ever. A coincidence-driven comedy of errors… Glinting with hard-won wisdom lightly worn

Observer

A state-of-the-nation novel that brilliantly uses the conventions of farce, satire and social critique to evoke a nation drifting indifferently into chaos… St Aubyn’s portrait of the family and its sharp-edged sketches of various institutions of British life are often very, very funny and always penetrating; but they are also at times moving, especially when they relate to mental health… [Parallel Lines] has formal verve and political vitality

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction Judges, 2025

An incredibly well written social commentary, carried by the dark wit of Edward St Aubyn… It’s a brilliant and entertaining story

UK Press Syndication

St Aubyn’s ravenous curiosity about the quandaries of existence makes his intellectual investigations feel vital and exciting . . . Equally as stimulating is his hunger for goodness

Wall Street Journal

Tenuous relationships and grave predicaments serve as the connective tissue in St. Aubyn’s latest novel, which follows an overlapping cast of characters dealing with childhood trauma, climate catastrophe and a life-threatening diagnosis over the course of a year

Best Books for Summer, New York Times

St Aubyn is as caustically clever as ever

Best Books for Summer, Vulture

[A] subtly seditious tour of contemporary anxieties and its therapies, those non-identical twins forever seeking each other out in the perpetual dark

Oldie, *Novel of the Month*

Parallel Lines is bursting with characters and ideas . . . Real humans – wounded, flawed and often beautiful – stand behind, and sometimes place themselves in the way of, the ideas the novel confronts

Washington Post

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

New York Times