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Dunbar

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, now a major Sky Atlantic television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he handed over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan. But relations quickly soured, leaving him to doubt the wisdom of past decisions.

Now imprisoned in a care home in the Lake District with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. Who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate?

© Edward St Aubyn 2017 (P) Penguin Audio 2017

 Drama & Plays Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Shakespeare

Critic reviews

St Aubyn has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat… His prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect
Malevolently enjoyable… A fable of fatherly neglect and daughterly cruelty
Deeply affecting…and funny
Powerful… Entertaining
Of all the novelist and play matches in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, that of Edward St Aubyn with King Lear seems the finest. Shakespeare’s blackest, most surreal and hectic tragedy sharpened by one of our blackest, more surreal and hectic wits… It's an enticing prospect... His Lear is Henry Dunbar, the head of an international media corporation – like Conrad Black or Rupert Murdoch – and is brilliantly awful… The other characters, even minor ones, are also wittily and cleverly updated (Kate Clanchy)
He is an inspired choice to retell King Lear for Hogarth Shakespeare’s anniversary series. Dunbar emerges as one of the finest contributions in a line-up glittering with literary stars…He has transplanted the heart of the story into the present and made it feel remarkably authentic (Stephanie Merritt)
A piercing portrait of existential agony... savagely acute (Anthony Cummins)
Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family’s internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption… An Aubynesque simile can brighten a grey passage… Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining (Patrick Skene Catling)
St Aubyn is excellent on the characters’ psychology... powerful and moving (Anthony Gardner)
Malevolently enjoyable… The scenes that feel most real, interestingly, are those that are most fantastical, when we are drawn inside the chaos of Dunbar’s unravelling mind… Here the language feels sculpted and precise, Dunbar’s obsessive solipsism both violent and convincing… St Aubyn’s talent for brittle one-liners is as lethal as ever (Andrew Dickson)
All stars
Most relevant
This is one of the weaker attempts at adapting Shakespeare into contemporary fiction. The book works best when it deals directly with Dunbar/Lear and is less interesting dealing with the daughters as they seem to have been given too much coverage here.I am not too sure about the American setting either as I cannot help thinking it only distances the tale rather than further illuminating Shakespeare's text.The lack of Shakespeare's poetic greatness in this particular play is never overcome.A brave attempt never the less.

Good in places.

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I really rate this author... And the reader is no slouch either. While the Patrick Melrose novels have a cast list of really awful posh people, this is a narrative of really awful rich people with their relationships drawn by analogies with King Lear and his (mostly) dreadful entourage.

Very absorbing

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Don’t know if I’m missing a final chapter but lots and lots of loose ends to what was a very enjoyable story

No ending?

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