Deborah Levy Libros

La nueva novela de Deborah Levy, finalista del Premio Booker, y la aclamada autora de El hombre que lo vio todo y El coste de vivir. «Lafuerza de Levy es su originalidad de pensamiento y expresión». Jeanette Winterson A sus treinta y cuatro años, la virtuosa y célebre pianista Elsa M. Anderson se encuentra en la cúspide de su carrera, hasta que, de forma inesperada, abandona el escenario durante una actuación en Viena. Pero esta historia en realidad empieza algo después, con Elsa en Atenas, en un mercadillo, con una mujer que acaba de comprar un par de caballitos mecánicos bailarines, una mujer extrañamente familiar con la que Elsa podría compartir los mismos deseos, o incluso ser la misma persona. Y sigue con un viaje a la isla de Poros, el primero destino de otros a través de Europa, escapando en realidad de su talento y su pasado como niña prodigio, y acechada siempre por esa mujer esquiva que podría ser ella misma. Seleccionado como uno de los libros del año en 2023 por The Guardian, Independent, Financial Times y la revista Time, Azul de agosto es el deslumbrante y melancólico retrato de una transformación, en el que Deborah Levy, premiada con el Fémina Étranger y finalista del Booker, desvela los misteriosos caminos por los que intentamos revisar nuestras viejas historias y renovar nuestra identidad.

Nada más llegar con su familia a una casa en las colinas con vistas a Niza, Joe descubre el cuerpo de una chica en la piscina. Pero Kitty Finch está viva, sale del agua desnuda con las uñas pintadas de verde y se presenta como botánica... ¿Qué hace ahí? ¿Qué quiere de ellos? Y ¿por qué la esposa de Joe le permite quedarse? Nadando a casa es un libro subversivo y trepidante, una mirada implacable sobre el insidioso efecto de la depresión en personas aparentemente estables y distinguidas. Con una estructura muy ajustada, la historia se desarrolla en una casa de veraneo a lo largo de una semana en la que un grupo de atractivos e imperfectos turistas en la Riviera son llevados al límite. Con un humor mordaz, la novela capta la atención del lector de inmediato, sobrellevando su lado tenebroso con ligereza.

'Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A Pandemic. A love story.' From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography' 'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer on The Cost of Living Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. 'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.' 'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise... A brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph on The Cost of Living 'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times on The Cost of Living

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020 Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'. 'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer _________________________________ 'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .' The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real Estate, is available now. _________________________________ 'I just haven't stopped reading it . . . it talks so beautifully about being a woman' Billie Piper on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs 'It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself. Wonderful' Guardian 'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise . . . a brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph 'A graceful and lyrical rumination on the questions, "What is a woman for? What should a woman be?"' Tatler 'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are, they completely out of control and ready to explode?

'Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.' Deborah Levy

Taking George Orwell's famous essay, 'Why I Write', as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her own indispensable reflections of the writing life. With wit, clarity and calm brilliance, she considers how the writer must stake claim to that contested territory and shape it to her need. It is a work of dazzling insight and deep psychological succour, from one of our most vital contemporary writers. This first volume of the trilogy focuses on the writer as a young woman - the confusion and turbulence of youth, and the uncertainties of carving an identity as a writer. The second volume, The Cost of Living, speaks to the challenges of middle age as a writer and a woman - motherhood, separation, bereavement.

Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's feverish allegory of a first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques--among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture. In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself. In The Unloved, a group of hedonistic tourists--from Algeria, England, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, and America--gathers to celebrate the holidays in a remote French château. Then a woman is brutally murdered, and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it. The subsequent inquiry into the death, however, proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of identity, love, insatiable rage, and sadistic desire.

"She is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. A storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life."--Back cover

How does love change us? How do we change ourselves for love - or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. From London gardens to a forest outside Prague, these are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour, about what it means to live and love, together and alone.