Deborah Levy

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The Position of Spoons

August Blue

Vintage Classics French Series

The Inseparables

30 Reflections from Exploring on Foot

Writers on Walks: A BBC Radio 3 Collection

Living Autobiography 3

Real Estate

The Man Who Saw Everything

Swallowing Geography

Living Autobiography 2

The Cost of Living

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

Living Autobiography 1

Things I Don't Want to Know

Swimming Home

The Unloved

Beautiful Mutants

Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography

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Hot Milk

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Unsettling, challenging and gloriously written, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy is the multi-generational story of a hallucinatory sort of summer

Leaves the reader enraptured and unnerved

Publisher's description. Shortlisted for the Man Booker and Goldsmiths prizes, a hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power under the scorching midday sun. Sofia and her mother arrive on the Spanish coast looking for answers - what they find there will be strange, seductive and fearsome beyond their wildest dreams.

Vibrant...an intense, sun-drenched story.  The prose veers dizzily between the poetic and the convoluted, spreading a hallucinatory patina of weirdness over everything.  This is a writer for whom ordinary language just will not do.

An extraordinary novel, beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex.  Every woman should read it

Bernardine Evaristo, author of MR LOVERMAN

So mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell...Sex suffuses the novel, with pleasure frequently crossing into pain

A smart, seductive and utterly beguiling read

Elegant and deeply strange [and] hummingly funny throughout

What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy's great imagination, the poetry of her language [and] moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor

Two strangers arrive in a small Spanish fishing village. The older woman is suffering from mysterious paralysis, driven to seek a cure beyond the bounds of conventional medicine. Her daughter Sofia has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness. 
 
Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat, searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, Sofia is forced to confront her difficult relationship with her mother. Examining female rage and sexuality, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2016 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 
 
Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the author of Swimming Home and The Man Who Saw Everything 
 
'Propulsive, uncanny, dreamlike. A feverish coming-of-age novel' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A triumph of storytelling' Literary Review 
_________________________________ 
 
'Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach. My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I . . .' 
 
Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years. 
 
Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless. 
_________________________________ 
 
'Perfectly crafted. So mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Hot Milk treads a sweaty, sun-drenched path into the history books. A properly great novel' Romola Garai 
 
'Hot Milk is an extraordinary novel, beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex... Every man and woman should read it' Bernardine Evaristo 
 
'Hypnotic... This novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned' Observer 
 
'Terrific, sizzling with heat and sexuality . . . You devour it in one sitting' Radio Times

Sofia and her mother, Rose, arrive on the Spanish coast seeking help. Rose is the victim of a biological conspiracy: her legs have stopped working and no one can tell her why. Both women are desperate for the truth - but awaiting them in Almeria are many more questions than answers. 
 
Almeria is a place caught between the desert and the deep blue sea. It is a place of shifting mirages and ghostly jellyfish floating in the evening tide, watched over by the famous Dr Gomez and his glamorous assistant, Nurse Sunshine. Simmering with hope and longing, Sofia has come seeking solutions, but the answers she finds are always to questions she had not thought to ask. 
 
Under the unblinking glare of the desert sun, mother and daughter strain at the ragged boundaries of their relationship, testing the bonds of kinship to breaking point. Intoxicating and compulsively readable, Hot Milk unspools a hypnotic tale of female rage and sexuality, of myths and timeless monsters. 
 
'Astute, poetic and wise, Hot Milk confirms Deborah Levy's reputation as a master of the contemporary psychological novel' Darian Leader 
 
A HAMISH HAMILTON BOOK

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Hot Milk

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