Hot Milk - Softcover

Levy, Deborah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0735234124 ISBN 13: 9780735234123

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2016

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016

A richly mythic, colour-saturated tale from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Swimming Home—Deborah Levy explores the violently primal bond between mother and daughter.

Two women arrive in a Spanish village—a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean—seeking medical advice and salvation. One of the strangers suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, 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 and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr. Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity.
     Hot Milk is a labyrinth of violent desires, primal impulses, and surreally persuasive internal logic. Examining female rage and sexuality, Deborah Levy's dazzling new novel explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.

About this title

About the Author

Deborah Levy is the author of five novels: Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved, Billy and Girl and the Man Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home. Her short-story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the Frank O’Conner International Short Story Award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatizations of Freud’s iconic case studies Dora and The Wolfman. Levy has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and her pioneering theatre writing is collected in Levy: Plays 1. Levy was an AHRB Fellow at the Royal College of Art. She is currently writing the sequel to her autobiographic essay on writing, gender politics and philosophy, Things I Don’t Want to Know.

Review

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016

“Gorgeous . . . What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind.” — The New York Times

“Highbrow/Brilliant. [An] intensely interior but highly charged new novel about family, hypochondria, Spain, Greece, and all kinds of sex.” — New York Magazine, Approval Matrix

“Levy has spun a web of violent beauty and poetical ennui . . . the book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Hot Milk is a complicated, gorgeous work.” — Marie Claire

“A powerful novel of the interior life, which Levy creates with a vividness that recalls Virginia Woolf . . . Transfixing.” — Erica Wagner, The Guardian

“Exquisite prose . . . Hot Milk is perfectly crafted, a dream-narrative so mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell. Reaching the end is like finding a piece of glass on the beach, shaped into a sphere by the sea, that can be held up and looked into like a glass-eye and kept, in secret, to be looked at again and again.” — Suzanne Joinson, The Independent

“Levy’s language is precise. The absurdities of her style seem scattershot at first, but yield a larger pattern: a commentary on debt and personal responsibility, family ties and independence.” — Washington Post

“Economical, fluid, evocative of sex and mythology . . . . Young Sofia . . . drop[s] beautiful bombs of truth.” — New York Magazine’s Vulture blog

“A singular read . . . Levy has crafted a great character in Sofia, and witnessing a pivotal moment in her life is a pleasure.” — starred and boxed review, Publishers Weekly

“Scintillating, provocative . . . Levy combines intellect and empathy to impressively modern effect.” — starred review, Kirkus Reviews

“Great lush writing [and] luxuriation in place. No writer infuses the landscape, urban or rural, with as much meaning and monstrosity as Levy . . . Unmissable.” — Eimear McBride, The New Statesman

“A beguiling tale of myths and identity . . . provocative . . . The difficult, ambivalent, precious mother-daughter relationship forms the core of this beautiful, clever novel.” — Michele Roberts, The Independent

“Among the questions posed in this heady new novel: Is Sofia’s mother, Rose, sick or a hypochondriac who’s feverish for attention? And more important, can the frustrated Sofia break the chains of familial devotion and live for herself?” — O, the Oprah Magazine

“The author of the elusive, powerful novel Swimming Home has another tale of family dysfunction. In the unforgiving heat of southern Spain, wayward anthropologist Sofia Papastergiadis delivers her mother into the hands of an eccentric doctor whom they hope can diagnose the mysterious illness that has taken over her body.” — Elle.com, “11 of the Best Books to Read in July”

“A fascinating book about sexuality, anger, medicine, and the drive to stay alive, Hot Milk is a unique novel that reads like a lucid dream.” — Bustle, “12 Travel Books That Will Transport You This Summer”

“Mesmerizing . . . evocative and complex.” — Booklist

“A terrific tale of mothers and daughters and fathers and daughters and confusion and old age, sickness, woe . . . and finding love tucked away in strange places.” — R.A.L.P.H. Magazine

“Dazzling and, at times, deeply disturbing, Hot Milk is a mystery meets introspective coming-of-age novel. It's unnerving--and that's a good thing.” — Refinery 29, “20 Books Perfect For Your Summer Vacay”

“The Man Booker short-listed Levy . . . draws in readers with beautiful language and unexpected moments of humor and shock.” — Library Journal

“A captivating demonstration of why Levy is one of the few necessary novelists writing in Britain today. This is the poetry and playfulness of her prose . . . More important, Levy grapples with and presents the complex psychology and multiple facets of her female characters like few others, which makes the recent reappraisal of her life’s work all the more welcome.” - The Forward

“A fraught, intense bond between mother and daughter is poetically rendered in Hot Milk, Deborah Levy’s follow-up to the 2012 Man Booker short-listed Swimming Home.” — San Diego Magazine, “5 Books to Read in July”

“Acutely relevant . . . A triumph of technically adroit storytelling. Levy’s elegant and poised prose has the rare quality of being simultaneously expansive and succinct . . . A breath of fresh air.” — The Literary Review

“A superbly crafted novel that is an inherently fascinating and consistently compelling read from beginning to end, Hot Milk clearly reveals author Deborah Levy as an exceptionally gifted storyteller.” — Midwest Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0735234124
• ISBN 13: 9780735234123
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224