Description

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020

Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don’t Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy’s essential three-part ‘Living Autobiography’.

‘I can’t think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman’ Observer
_________________________________

‘Life falls apart.
We try to get a grip and hold it together.
And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together . . .’

The final instalment in Deborah Levy’s critically acclaimed ‘Living Autobiography’, Real Estate, is available now.
_________________________________

‘I just haven’t stopped reading it . . . it talks so beautifully about being a woman’ Billie Piper on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs

‘It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself. Wonderful’ Guardian

‘Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy’s every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise . . . a brilliant writer’ Daily Telegraph

‘A graceful and lyrical rumination on the questions, “What is a woman for? What should a woman be?”‘ Tatler

‘Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights’ Financial Times

Publisher Review

Both memoir and feminist manifesto, her writing focuses so sharply on what it means to be alive that she's given me much-needed clarity...Levy subtly informs us about what it is to be a woman. * Vogue * This, from Deborah Levy, is exceptional. A memoir of life, art and separation. How to write when you're broke, have no writing space, are a parent. Also: crushed chickens, electric bikes, plumbing. Out in May and an early contender for one of the books of the year * Sinead Gleeson * A heady, absorbing read * Evening Standard * Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed should be endowed with a blue plaque * Telegraph * Ingenious, practical and dryly amused... This is a manifesto for a risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the same * New Statesman * It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself... A piece of work that is not so much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls 'a new way of living' in the post-familial world * Guardian * Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights * Financial Times * Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living * Observer *