Hot Milk
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  • Published: 24 March 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241968024
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

Hot Milk

Formats & editions
Paperback
29 May 2017
EBook
24 Mar 2016
Audiobook
24 Mar 2016
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From the Man Booker-shortlisted author of Swimming Home, a novel about psychosomatic illness, female identity and the stubborn bond between mother and daughter

Two strangers arrive in a small Spanish fishing village. The older woman is suffering from mysterious paralysis, driven to seek a cure beyond the bounds of conventional medicine. 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, searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, Sofia is forced to confront her difficult relationship with her mother. Examining female rage and sexuality, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent and child to breaking point.
  • Published: 24 March 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241968024
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208
Categories:

About the author

Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage.

Also by Deborah Levy

Real Estate
August Blue
Things I Don't Want to Know
The Cost of Living
The Position of Spoons
The Man Who Saw Everything
Beautiful Mutants
See all

Praise for Hot Milk

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

A smart, seductive and utterly beguiling read

Mail on Sunday

An extraordinary novel, beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex. Every woman should read it

Bernardine Evaristo, author of MR LOVERMAN

Elegant and deeply strange [and] hummingly funny throughout

Spectator

Publisher's description. Shortlisted for the Man Booker and Goldsmiths prizes, a hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power under the scorching midday sun. Sofia and her mother arrive on the Spanish coast looking for answers - what they find there will be strange, seductive and fearsome beyond their wildest dreams.

Penguin

So mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell...Sex suffuses the novel, with pleasure frequently crossing into pain

Independent on Sunday

Vibrant...an intense, sun-drenched story. The prose veers dizzily between the poetic and the convoluted, spreading a hallucinatory patina of weirdness over everything. This is a writer for whom ordinary language just will not do.

The Times

What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy's great imagination, the poetry of her language [and] moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor

New York Times