Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for June 2017
Longlisted for theMan Booker Prize2016
A transfixing novel where lives are held in strange,changeless abeyance; like stones beaten over and over again by the same relentless tide.
On Monday my mother will display her various symptoms to the consultant like an assortment of mysterious canapes. I will be holding the tray.'
A mother and daughter arrive in a small Spanish village,caught between the desert and the dark blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Rose,struck down by a mysterious illness that has left her incapacitated,is hoping for miraculous treatment from the mysterious Dr Gomez in his clinic. Her daughter Sofia is trapped by her mother's illness; paralysed herself by a life in which she is chained to her mother's hypochondria,neurosis and immobility.
As the hot sun beats down,these two women's lives simmer with pent-up resentment and bitterness. As Sofia struggles against the confines of the caged existence her mother has created for her,exploring her own sexuality and independence she threatens to tear the fragile threads that hold these two women's lives together.
There is a wonderful,playful surrealism here deliberately at odds with the glaring immediacy of this post-austerity Europe. Here are characters,countries,locked into immobility; waiting on the edge of what may be development,growth or catastrophic decline.
Hot Milk is a novel that seems to have emerged directly from the times we live in. Uncompromising,brave,sharply funny and delightfully curious,this is a novel for our times.'It's entertaining and reads swiftly. But it's also strange. That strangeness - intriguing strangeness,hard-to-put-your-finger-on strangeness - is what marks this novel as noteworthy.'Financial Times
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241968031Number of pages: 224Weight: 159 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 14 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
"Unsettling,challenging and gloriously written,Hot Milk by Deborah Levy is the multi-generational story of a hallucinatory sort of summer" - Juliet Nicolson,Evening Standard
"Leaves the reader enraptured and unnerved" - Jackie Annesley,Evening Standard
Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy is a British novelist,short story writer,playwright and poet,whose proficiency across multiple literary forms marks her out as one of the great contemporary literary figures. Levy has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize twice,for Swimming Home and Hot Milk.
Visit the Deborah Levy author page
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