Parallel Lines
Published by: Vintage, Penguin Random House
‘The Ministry of Truth is now tightening its grip by the hour,’ comments one character in Edward St. Aubyn’s new book, 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. Written in riotously creative language, 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, which never seems parochial despite its apparently insular metropolitan setting, reinvents the so-called Hampstead novel with formal verve and political vitality.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
