Dunbar : William Shakespeare's King Lear Retold: a Novel

One of Town & Country's "6 must-read books for October"
One of Vulture's "8 must reads for October"

Praise for Dunbar

"The pairing of St. Aubyn with Lear seems predestined--who better to reckon with a play about frustrated power and familial resentment than the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, a five-book exorcism of ancestral demons? St. Aubyn rivals Shakespeare in his magnificently scathing language...There's no novelist alive who combines his gift for irony and his Wodehousian satire of the upper classes with his acute comprehension of the bleakness of existence." - The Atlantic

"St. Aubyn's writing has a lavishness that still retains precision -- he never allows mistiness to descend on his metaphors... St. Aubyn has built a career out of family pain, and his language has a wonderful poetic density, dry, expansive, self-conscious, and savage, all at once." - NPR.org

"St. Aubyn shines at skewering the rich and profligate." - The Los Angeles Times

"[Dunbar is] an enjoyable, breakneck ride through the misdeeds of one of the greatest stages of fools you'll ever meet." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Henry Dunbar--think Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone--breaks free of an English sanatorium, set on revenge." - Esquire

"A brilliant reworking of William Shakespeare's King Lear for our day." - Kirkus (starred)

"St. Aubyn's resplendent rendering of nature's grand drama and Dunbar's shattered psyche, Florence's love, and her sisters' malevolence make for a stylish, embroiling, and acid tragedy." - Booklist

"The tale is the perfect vehicle for what this author does best, which is to expose repellent, privileged people and their hollow dynasties in stellar prose." - Publishers Weekly

Praise for Edward St. Aubyn:

"Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generation." - Alan Hollinghurst

"Nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St Aubyn's world - or more surprising - its philosophical density." - Zadie Smith, Harpers

"St Aubyn conveys the chaos of emotion, the confusion of heightened sensation, and the daunting contradictions of intellectual endeavour with a force and subtlety that have an exhilarating, almost therapeutic effect." - Francis Wyndham, New York Review of Books