Hot Milk (2016)
by Deborah Levy
☆ Shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize
Hot Milk, Deborah Levy’s sixth novel, is about a mother and daughter, Rose and Sophie, who travel to a village on the coast of Spain to seek help for Rose’s mystery ailment, which has left her in a wheelchair. Deborah Levy explores Rose and Sophie’s complex relationship of love, resentment and bitterness. While there is a surreal, dream-like quality to Levy’s writing, Sophie paradoxically searches for clarity.
Recommendations from our site
“Hot Milk is about Rose, who has confusing and debilitating health problems, and her daughter Sofia, who finds her mother exasperating but seems perpetually tied to her, and even sometimes experiences apparent sympathy pains for her. The novel sees them travel to a peculiar clinic in Spain, where Rose is supposedly going to be cured of the cause-less paralysis that has confined her to a wheelchair by a strange man named Gómez. The novel is a dense, literary exploration of Sofia’s interior life, but it also provides some fascinating and tragic insights into the plight of the hypochondriac.” Read more...
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Caroline Crampton, Memoirist
“The mother in Hot Milk, Rose Papastergiadis, is spirited and controlling, and also a loving woman. I’m showing that she can be many contradictory things at the same time: infuriating and endearing. I’m also looking at the way that she uses her illness as a means of control. That’s a very complicated theme because we are looking at a history, not just a story. There is a question at the centre of Hot Milk and Sofia, the daughter, nails that question. Sofia understands that her mother’s wishes and hopes for herself have been dispersed in the winds and storms of a world not arranged to her advantage.” Read more...
Deborah Levy on Motherhood in Literature
Deborah Levy, Novelist
