Also Available from Deborah Levy

Hot Milk

Man Booker Prize Finalist

Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother’s unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. But Dr. Gómez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as Rose’s illness becomes increasingly baffling, Sofia discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.

Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.

“Gorgeous … What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind.” —Sarah Lyall, The New York Times Book Review

“Against fertile seaside backdrops, Sofia, seeking a robust, global meaning for femininity and motherhood, becomes increasingly bold.” —The New Yorker

 

Also Available from Deborah Levy

Swimming Home

Man Booker Prize Finalist

As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe’s enigmatic wife allow her to remain?

A subversively brilliant study of love, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.

“Exquisite.” —The New Yorker

“Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens … Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy’s wry, accomplished novel.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

“Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Elegant … subtle … uncanny … The seductive pleasure of Levy’s prose stems from its layered brilliance … [Swimming Home is] witty right up until it’s unbearably sad.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

 

Also Available from Deborah Levy

Black Vodka

The stories in Black Vodka, by acclaimed author Deborah Levy, are perfectly formed worlds unto themselves, written in elegant yet economical prose. She is a master of the short story, exploring loneliness and belonging; violence and tenderness; the ephemeral and the solid; the grotesque and the beautiful; love and infidelity; and fluid identities national, cultural, and personal. In “Shining a Light,” a woman’s lost luggage is juxtaposed with far more serious losses; a man’s empathy threatens to destroy him in “Stardust Nation”; “Cave Girl” features a girl who wants to be a different kind of woman and succeeds in a shocking way; and a deformed man seeks beauty amid his angst in the title story.

These are twenty-first-century lives dissected with razor-sharp humor and curiosity. Levy’s stories will send you tumbling into a rabbit hole, and you won’t be able to scramble out until long after you’ve turned the last page.

“These ominous, odd, erotic stories burrow deep into your brain.” —Financial Times

“One of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction … Sophisticated and astringent.” —The Times Literary Supplement

 

Also Available from Deborah Levy

Things I Don’t Want to Know

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don’t Want to Know is Deborah Levy’s witty response to George Orwell’s influential essay “Why I Write.” Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter—political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm—and Levy’s newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer’s perspective.

As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family’s emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe’s economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life good-bye.

Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the author at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don’t Want to Know brings the reader into a writer’s heart.

“A profound and vivid little volume that is less about the craft than the necessity of making literature.” —Los Angeles Times

“A lively, vivid account of how the most innocent details of a writer’s personal story can gain power in fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review

 

Also Available from Deborah Levy

The Cost of Living

A vital and exhilarating modern manifesto on the politics of womanhood.

What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?

This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson.

The Cost of Living is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy’s acclaimed novels.

 

“What a thrill to read this account by a brilliant woman of leaving patriarchy’s marital and maternal ‘we’ to enter scary freedom in the land of ‘I.’ Expect lightning and the flash of spinning knives: Deborah Levy’s prose keeps The Cost of Living as comic and bold as the author whizzing through traffic on her electric bike, as vivid as the feral parrots she sees in the trees outside her London window. I loved this book!” —Honor Moore

“Keen and moving … Timely … Will resonate with many readers.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)