Books by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy is a playwright, novelist, and poet. Two of her novels—Hot Milk (2016) and Swimming Home (2011), have been shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious fiction award, the Booker Prize. Her collection of short stories, Black Vodka (2013), was shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.
Swimming Home (2011)
by Deborah Levy
☆ Shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize
Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home was is set over the course of a summer in a French villa. Two families, made up of Joe and Isabel Jacobs and their daughter Nina, and their friends Laura and Mitchell, share the villa. They are surprised by the appearance of a stranger in their pool, Kitty Finch. Kitty is invited to stay and tensions swell. Each page presents some new secret, fear, insecurity, or deception.
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.
“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...
The best books on Hypochondria
Caroline Crampton, Memoirist
Things I Don't Want to Know (2013)
by Deborah Levy
Things I Don’t Want to Know, published in 2014, is the first volume of Deborah Levy’s three-part ‘Living Autobiography’. Levy writes about her life in South Africa, particularly her father’s imprisonment, adapting to life in the UK, and travelling. The position of women is also at the centre – what it is to be a woman writer, the all-consuming intensity of motherhood. The Cost of Living and Real Estate complete the trilogy, delving deeper into Levy’s life, opinions, and questions.
The Man Who Saw Everything (2019)
by Deborah Levy
The Man Who Saw Everything follows a young historian, Saul Adler. In 1988 he is hit by a car on Abbey Road in London, but suffers no serious injuries. His girlfriend breaks up with him and he goes to study in East Germany, months before the Berlin Wall comes down. In 2016 he is once again hit by a car on Abbey Road. Deborah Levy slips between time zones and explores memory, history, and love. The Man Who Saw Everything was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.
Beautiful Mutants (1989)
by Deborah Levy
Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's first novel, published in 1989, follows Lapinski, a mysterious Russian exile. Levy conjures a series of beautiful mutants, from the Poet, who works on a conveyor belt making burgers, to the Banker, a pyromaniac. It is a short novel, effectively a novella, which is bold and unsettling. While it is certainly worth reading, Deborah Levy's debut is an acquired taste as its surrealist quality makes it difficult to trace what is happening, and where the novel is going. Beautiful Mutants has recently been published alongside Swallowing Geography, originally published in 1993, to showcase Levy's innovative early works.
Interviews with Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy on Motherhood in Literature
Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the infamously fraught relationship between mother and daughter. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood.
Interviews where books by Deborah Levy were recommended
Deborah Levy on Motherhood in Literature
Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the infamously fraught relationship between mother and daughter. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood.
The best books on Hypochondria, recommended by Caroline Crampton
Author Caroline Crampton was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teenager. She recovered, but ever since she has suffered from health anxiety—what you might call ‘hypochondria.’ Here, she recommends five of the best books on hypochondria, from memoirs by sufferers to Jane Austen’s final, caustic novel.
