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The powerful second memoir from the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home

´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 . . .´

´At the age of 50 and after decades of north London family-making, Levy finds herself cast adrift from her marriage and, crucially, without any desire to swim back. 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. Not so much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls "a new way of living" ´ 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

´I can´t think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman´ Observer

´Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights´ Financial Times

´A heady, absorbing read´ Evening Standard

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Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can´t think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living Observer

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Levy, Deborah
Deborah Levy is a British playwright, novelist and poet. She is the author of seven novels: Beautiful Mutants (1986); Swallowing Geography (1993); The Unloved (1994); Billy & Girl (1996); Swimming Home (2011); Hot Milk (2016) and the forthcoming The Man Who Saw Everything (2019). Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012; Hot Milk was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 and the Goldsmiths Prize 2016. Deborah is also the author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, Black Vodka (2013), and two ´living autobiographies´, Things I Don´t Want To Know and The Cost of Living. She has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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