I am the author of three novels that all explore contemporary notions of fidentity. In 2016 I received a scholarship to travel from New Zealand to Berlin for three months and fell in love with the city. I ended up staying there for nearly four years, until the pandemic started. As a writer I liked the way that being detached from your regular life, and living in a country where you are unfamiliar with the language and the rules, makes you alert to the quirks. It helps you to gain a fresh perspective about the place that you came from, and also the place that you are in.
Deborah Levy’s novels are often set in places where the location becomes a character – blazing hot Spain in Hot Milk, south of France in Swimming Home – but also estrangement unsettles her characters enough to begin to really consider who they are.
In her latest, August Blue, Elsa is a classical piano prodigy, still reeling from a catastrophic concert, when she sees her doppelganger in an Athens flea market. The encounter triggers gauzy memories of her upbringing, as she travels to Paris, to London, and then to Sardinia where the man who adopted her at the age of six and nurtured her talent is dying.
Each place is so viscerally described, I wanted to be physically there as Levy drops obscure metaphorical clues about Elsa’s true identity.
The mesmerising new novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home
At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her thirties - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.…
Suffering from writer’s block, a novelist leaves her husband and children in Brooklyn and checks into the Tel Aviv Hilton to be near the pool from her childhood holidays.
Away from her usual domesticity, she considers where her choices have lead her: “What if, I thought, rather than existing in a universal space, each of us is actually born alone into a luminous blankness, and it’s we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations in our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world?”
This novel has many strands, but I loved how the writer is drawn into a mystery surrounding Kafka’s estate, with an elderly cat hoarder claiming legal rights to his unpublished papers. All the more alluring because it is based in truth.
CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMES
'Lucid and exhilarating ... A great gift' New York Review of Books
'Tantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel' Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman
Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he's fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean…
A traditional mystery with a touch of cozy, The Alchemy Fire Murder is for those who like feisty women sleuths, Oxford Colleges, alchemy, strong characters, and real concerns like trafficking, wildfires, racism, and climate change. This book especially works for those fascinated by myth and witches in history. Read for…
A Kirkus review aptly described this novel as “mysterious, bizarre, frustrating, weirdly smart and pretty cool”.
It’s mostly a fiercely intelligent exploration of both political and personal crises in 2017, the year of Trump and Brexit. Radical feminist Kathy has also fairly inexplicably agreed to get married. Pre-wedding she travels to a resort in Italy with her fiancé where she tumbles through a range of highly-emotive stances on intimacy and closeness.
After an argument about prosciutto and fig ciabattas with her husband “she hated him, she hated any kind of warmth or dependency, she wanted to take up residence as an ice cube in a long glass of aqua frizzante.” Her fury quickly dissolves “anyway they sorted it out” and the novel travels brilliantly onwards.
"She had no idea what to do with love, she experienced it as invasion, as the prelude to loss and pain, she really didn't have a clue."
Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart. Fast-paced and frantic, Crudo unfolds in real time from the full-throttle perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.
From a Tuscan hotel for the superrich to a Brexit-paralyzed United Kingdom, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties adjusting to the idea of a lifelong commitment. But…
For me, Catherine Lacey’s debut novel Nobody Is Ever Missing is a kind of reverse exploration of foreignness.
Elyria escapes from a comfortable New York life to New Zealand, where she backpacks down to the South Island towards a half-hearted invitation to stay from a poet she once met. Interesting to see your own country through the eyes of another writer as she observes “a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not” while she searches for a “small and manageable life”.
As she outwardly drifts through the landscape she also takes us on a very inward journey, interrogating her own thoughts about her adopted sister’s suicide, the mutual grief that drew her to her husband, and her mother’s drinking.
In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge.
Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.
Always Orchid is the moving, award-winning finale to the Goodbye Orchid series that Glamour Magazine called "a modern, important take on the power of love." With themes of identity, disability, and the redemptive power of love, Always Orchid is perfect for fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle…
This book, the first in Rachel Cusk’s famous trilogy, was a revelation to me because it feels so radically unstructured but at the same time is fascinating in its form.
The narrator travels to Athens to teach a summer writing course but the details about her are kept so sketchy that we only really get to know her through the way she receives what others tell her. Faye is brilliantly observant, and only gradually do you begin to realise, as a reader, that the author is subtly meditating on a series of themes through these conversations, mostly about disappointments and divorces.
The first in Rachel Cusk's critically-acclaimed trilogy, shortlisted for the Folio Prize and the Goldsmith Prize and longlisted for the IMPAC Prize.
Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and lucid, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing over an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her student in storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her seatmate from the place. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves, their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator…
Ginny has always had questions about her mother, who took her own life with no explanation when Ginny was young. Now, in her thirties, she learns the devastating truth: her mother may have been developing Huntington’s disease, and chose to end her life rather than wait to find out.
Ginny could take the test that will reveal if she shares her mother’s fate. Instead she drops everything and bolts to Berlin, leaving her loving fiancé in the dark. Navigating the transient, hedonistic German city, she meets its inhabitants and absorbs their tangle of stories as she tries to gather the strength to face her future.
Seeker: As societies grow increasingly fragmented, hopelessness, nihilism, division, and despair are on the rise. But there is another way—a way of mystery and magic, of wholeness and transformation. Do you dare take the first step? Our path is not for the faint-hearted, but for seekers of ancient truths...
