Dunbar: William Shakespeare's King Lear Retold: A Novel [Paperback]

A reimagining of one of Shakespeare's most well-read tragedies, by the contemporary, critically acclaimed master of domestic drama

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions.
 
Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, 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. But 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 is renowned for his masterwork, the five Melrose novels, which dissect with savage and beautiful precision the agonies of family life. His take onKing Lear, Shakespeare’s most devastating family story, is an excoriating novel for and of our times – an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.One ofTown & Country's 6 must-read books for October
One ofVulture's 8 must reads for October

Praise forDunbar:

“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 buil“j