I was sent a copy of August Blue by Deborah Levy to read and review by NetGalley. I love Deborah Levy’s writing. There is never a word out of place or a phrase or sentence too many. I’m pretty sure that her style of writing will not be to everyone’s taste but if you persevere to the end of this novel I’m sure you won’t regret it! There isn’t anything that I really want to say about the story itself – just read and enjoy!

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read August Blue by Deborah Levy in exchange for an honest independent review. Elsa Anderson is a concert pianist whose hands are insured for millions of pounds. In the middle of a concert she stands up and walks away. Her journey from that moment - internal and external - is related in this book. She is experiencing a breakdown, a disintegration of her identity. So powerful are the forced that have been set in motion, Elsa believes she is followed by a 'double', another woman who she meets in various unexpected places such as Paris, Athens and London. How to survive this kind of splitting off of parts of our personality. Elsa takes on work - teaching piano to various talented young people. And those characters too, we wonder, are perhaps also parts of Elsa. She is paying attention, she is learning more about herself and her place in the world. She is also moving towards her own composition which she struggles to feel she is entitled to write and perform. I struggled a bit with this book at the beginning until I let go to the theme and to the slightly uncomfortable feeling of not really knowing what was going on. As I read I became more engrossed and as I let the story, strange though it is, wash over me, I began to feel I was being given a gift of seeing behind the curtain of a personality. Recommended so long as you too can let go to the mystery. I found the book fascinating and it has stayed with me, but it was more a book for my intellect than for my heart.

This was an odd book, thankfully quite short, playing with ideas of memory, family and being a child prodigy among others. At times I found the writing style quite irritating with snippets of information about famous composers thrown around and almost staccato sentences at times. I did find myself drawn into Anna's world and thoughts though and wanted to follow her journey. Thank you to netgalley and Penguin UK for an advance copy of this book

I am a Levy fan, yet this is a bit of a puzzle. I think I can see what the story wants to discuss but the "landscape" of what happens didn't feel convincingly right - there were for me too many "obvious" motifs set in this European artistic (and entitled!) world, which for me were too schematically depicted - no new angles on Paris, Vienna, London, Ipswich or Sardinia, nor on the actual human characters - none of them engaged or surprised me properly.. The virtuoso pianist protagonist, in her 30s, is in crisis after leaving mid-sentence a Rachmaninov concert in Vienna. The crisis is not just artistic - we have glimpses of a great number of other unresolved, unexamined, unknown stress points in the life of Elsa (nee Ann) Anderson not Arturadottir. The doppelgänger so to speak element - an elusive, imagined yet real unknown alter ego but sans blue hair and with hat (Elsa takes her trilby whilst she takes the two mechanical horses she covets), was for me a bit of a red herring even as it resolves itself as the novel progresses. The pandemic is there also as a leitmotif of the pain... and the key that seems to unlock the themes of the novel, and the reason for precisely that Rachmaninov concert, is given at the very end of the novel. i quite agree that mediated pain is bearable whilst witnessing real, individual pain is not. When the expectation is the former but we get the later we are in trouble. Worth reading and I am thinking that perhaps all the narrative cliches surrounding cities, skies and melodrama characters are there to serve a higher artistic purpose. Three/Four stars. With many thanks to Penguin/Hamish Hamilton via NetGalley

I want the time back, this is the most boring book I’ve ever read, it’s nonsensical ramblings of nothing, I bought this book because it was among the recommended books, I no longer believe in Waterstones recommendations. I now understand the review that says she writes like a dream, perhaps they meant they fell asleep. Her writing is very disjointed