Parallel Lines A Novel

From the best-selling and award-winning author of The Patrick Melrose novels, a hilarious and moving story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet intextricably linked—a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss, written with St, Aubyn’s trademark wit and inimitable style

It’s the summer of 2021, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the biological mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is facing challenges of his own, including his adopted daughter’s tenuous relationship with her own biological mother—a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily proximate to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on catastrophic natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis, and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of re-wilding the world. Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvelous new light.


With characteristic brilliance and humor, Parallel Lines investigates themes of dualism, determinism, connection and love. St. Aubyn captures the life of the spirit as vibrantly as the life of the mind, in a novel that wrestles with moral and psychic anguish and the cascading consequences of our choices at every stage of life. A thrilling, wholly captivating work from one of the most gifted writers at work today.

Edward St. Aubyn was born in London. His acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels are Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk (winner of the Prix Femina étranger and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and At Last. The series was made into a BAFTA Award–winning Sky Atlantic TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. St. Aubyn is also the author of A Clue to the Exit, On the Edge (short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize), Lost for Words (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Dunbar, and Double Blind.