A Guide to Deborah Levy’s Literary World

There are few writers working today who elicit as much universal adoration as Deborah Levy. Across several plays, novels and autobiographies, the South African author has proven herself a sharp observer of human relationships. She has an exacting eye that she hasn’t been afraid to turn on herself, examining her own life as closely as one of her character’s. She is often spoken about less like a novelist and more like a great singer or artist. Her hastily tied-up hair, matched with a crimson red lip, only heightens the persona. Much like the image of Anna Karina which appears on the cover of her 2018 memoir The Cost of Living, Levy is a character who is elusive, yet effortlessly cool.

In my only encounter with Levy, I spotted her sitting alone outside a pub in Islington, drinking a glass of white wine and smoking a cigarette. I would never have dared approach her, but the sight of her in such a quotidian setting stopped me in my tracks. How many writers can do that? Have the ability to make someone pause, hover even, as though they’ve glimpsed someone from their past? Of course, that sheer magnetism comes only after decades of consistently excellent work. 

Levy began her career in the 1980s as a playwright, initially finding fame for her political commentary and surrealist eye. She published her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, in 1989. After the publication of her fourth novel, Billy and Girl, in 1996, Levy notably stopped writing for 15 years. Instead, she focused on raising her children and living the domestic life that she would go on to mine so fruitfully for later autobiographies.

Her grand return came in 2011 with Swimming Home, a novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and reignited Levy’s career as a writer. What followed was a wave of successful releases. She was further nominated for the Booker Prize with the novels Hot Milk (2016) and The Man Who Saw Everything (2019). Alongside these novels, her “living autobiography” – Things I Don’t Want to Know (2014), The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021) – found her acclaim as a memoirist.

For those approaching Levy’s work for the first time, her bibliography can feel daunting. Across 16 books, her style shifts from dialogue-heavy to a more restrained, deliberate prose. She is an author to be read and reread. What follows is an overview of Levy’s work, designed to help you find your own ideal point of entry.

The crowd favourite: Hot Milk

I distinctly remember first reading Hot Milk. It was 2016 and I was working through that year’s Booker Prize longlist. It caught me completely off guard. I didn’t know who Levy was, but this novel of hers was so strange, so dark, so mean. I loved it.

The novel follows Sofia and her mother, Rose, who has been struck by a mysterious paralysing illness. They travel to a clinic in the south of Spain that claims to specialise in treating Rose’s condition, but everything about it feels suspicious. Sofia has doubts about her mother’s paraplegia and suspects that it may be psychosomatic or even fabricated. In Hot Milk, Levy pushes her readers, not asking them to take sides between mother and daughter, but inviting them to consider the nature of illness and its endlessly complicated manifestations.

I’ve always liked that the cover of Hot Milk presents itself as a sunny beach read, when in reality it comes closer to psychological horror. Rarely has the sunny south of Spain felt quite so dark. 

The often overlooked: Billy and Girl

Levy’s final novel before her 15-year absence is a jewel in her bibliography. Billy and Girl is the story of a brother and sister, Billy and Louise, who goes simply by “Girl.” Seemingly alone in the world, subsisting somewhere in England, they attempt to track down their parents. The chapters flit between perspectives in a blistering, in-yer-face voice that recalls other 1990s works such as Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar and Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs.

It’s a book really unlike anything else in Levy’s catalogue, a moment when her early taste for experimentation really pays off. You hurtle through the narrative, following these gobby siblings, as Levy throws so much at you that you have to just enjoy the ride. It’s genuinely quite strange that the author of something like Billy and Girl is also capable of writing a novel such as Hot Milk. The prose is punchy and full of references to ’90s consumer culture. One of the novel’s main settings is a supermarket called Freezerworld. Where Hot Milk is lethargic, Billy and Girl feels like a sugar rush. They feel like works from two different planets, but this only proves Levy’s versatility. 

The controversial: Early Levy

In 2014, as Levy’s dues were beginning to be paid in full following the publication of Swimming Home and her rising critical renown, a compendium of her two earliest novels was published under the title Early Levy. These early novels, Beautiful Mutants (1989) and Swallowing Geography (1993), chart her transition from playwright to novelist. They’re voice-heavy, sparse on exposition and fiendishly abstruse. Characters exist in liminal spaces, floating in and out of the narrative in a way that certainly makes sense on a stage, but perhaps less so in a novel. While the writing is strong, you do often find yourself questioning what exactly is happening. As one reviewer of Swallowing Geography stated on Goodreads: “Could not tell u what the fuck happened in this book but it was excellent vibes.”

Of the two novels, Swallowing Geography is the stronger. The short novel (it clocks in at fewer than 100 pages) follows a wanderer called J.K. who encounters a range of strange characters. The narrative is free-flowing and surreal. At one point, Trotsky and Lenin turn up. It’s deeply odd, but arresting.

The masterpiece: Swimming Home

The novel that marked Levy’s grand return to literature after 15 years of silence, Swimming Home was first published in 2011. Over the course of her absence, she had become a markedly changed writer from the one who penned Billy & Girl. Her prose had transformed, becoming clean and sharp. Her earlier penchant for heavy dialogue, a hangover from her years as a playwright, had all but disappeared. The novel’s setting was vividly realised and described, while the characters were more fully fleshed out, imbued with a strong sense of interiority. Gone was the experimentation; here was cutting realism.

Swimming Home is something of a reworking of Levy’s earlier novel The Unloved (1994). In that book, a disparate cast of characters is holed up in a French château while an investigation unfolds after one of them is murdered. Swimming Home takes the strongest elements of that premise — the remote French setting, the cast of characters unable to leave, the pervasive sense of dread — and reshapes them into a far more cohesive work. The novel centres on Kitty Finch, a young woman who inexplicably appears in the swimming pool of a French villa belonging to Joe and Isabel Jacobs, a literary couple on their summer holiday. Strangely, they allow this stranger to stay, a decision that quietly sets in motion the events of a psycho-sexual drama unfolding in the hills above Nice.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, the novel reintroduced Levy to readers worldwide and sparked renewed interest in her back catalogue. Swimming Home isn’t just her strongest work, it’s the work on which her whole brilliant career rests.

The latest: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

Levy’s latest novel, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, is published this month. Her ninth novel, it follows an unnamed narrator’s year in Paris as she researches an essay on the American émigré writer Gertrude Stein. Juxtaposing the narrative with biographical chapters about Stein’s life, the book moves between an extended essay on her life and work, as well as a researcher’s journey into her world.

In typical Levy form, much of the novel’s action is built from small everyday movements: nightwalks along the Seine, daily visits to the fresh food market, journeys to Avignon, drinking plenty of wine and a search for a missing cat. The turbulent life of Stein is juxtaposed with life today: “Meanwhile, bombs are falling through the twenty-first century upon the living and the soon-to-be dead,” she writes early in the novel. “Gertrude Stein lived through two world wars and wrote a memoir, titled Wars I Have Seen, published in 1945. She did not see either of these wars on a screen.”

What is so impressive about My Year in Paris… is the strength of Levy’s writing and her ideas. She is a writer at the height of her powers. Now in her mid-60s, she is writing more consistently – and brilliantly – than she ever has in her whole career. Few can truly match her output.