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Published Jun 2023
208 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A new novel from the Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, the celebrated author of The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living.
At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson—former child prodigy, now in her thirties—walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase 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.
So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy's August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.
"[A] magnificent experiment in surrealism ... This is a stunner."
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An economical, elliptical, but always entertaining novel of transformation by a highly skilled enigmatist."
―Kirkus Reviews
"[Deborah Levy's] style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack ... The narrative here has a fittingly musical quality, running forward in spurts, pausing, repeating key phrases ... The wistful, fabular quality is appealing, as are those aphoristic statements Levy is so skilled at dispensing: sly comments on contemporary power dynamics likewise in the process of changing into new and as yet uncertain forms."
―Olivia Laing, The Guardian (UK)
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Deborah Levy was born in 1959 in South Africa, where her father was a member of the African National Congress, an academic, and a historian. The family emigrated to Wembley Park, England in 1968. Her parents divorced in 1974
Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and and was director and writer for Manact Theatre Company, Cardiff
In 1986, at the age of 27, she wrote and published her first novel Beautiful Mutants. Her second novel, Swallowing Geography, was published in 1993, while her third one, Billy and Girl, was published in 1996. Swimming Home, was published in 2011 and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012. Hot Milk was published in 2016, and was ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Name Pronunciation
Deborah Levy: leave-ee
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