LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.
Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams.
Shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards 'UK Author of the Year' 2012.
A "Piece of Passion" from the publisher on Black Vodka and Swimming Home...
'In Swimming Home, the ripples just keep on spreading. What first captivated me about this novel was its sure-handed concision, which, instead of warding off strangeness, actually created a space where the real strangeness of life was allowed to show. Yet every time I hear from another excited reader, Swimming Home has shown them something else again: the place of foreignness in different characters, where the madness lies and why, who is tied to whom, new talismanic objects and words, brand-new literary connections, hooking the story back into a great history of stories. The further I plumb this slim fiction, the greater depths it reveals.
Which is why Deborah Levy’s new collection, Black Vodka: ten stories, is both a joy and a relief. A joy because that same rare taste for strangeness can be savoured again on every page; a relief because my tightly plotted mental map of Levy’s fathomless world can now open out into a range of new places, new characters and new moods. Many of the stories in Black Vodka obliquely take up themes also in Swimming Home: childhood displacements, psychological connections and disconnections, the burdens of history, the difficulty of staying in love. But they give you new ways of thinking about these things. In a way, Black Vodka allows us to read Levy’s world through a fresh new set of prisms.'
Sophie Lewis, Editor, And Other Stories
31st January 2013
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Swimming Home Synopsis
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's wife allow her to remain? Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a single week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. Deborah Levy's writing combines linguistic virtuosity, technical brilliance and a strong sense of what it means to be alive. Swimming Home represents a new direction for a major writer. In this book, the wildness and the danger are all the more powerful for resting just beneath the surface. With its biting humour and immediate appeal, it wears its darkness lightly. Swimming Home was also shortlisted for the New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize 2013. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and National Book Awards Author of the Year 2012
About This Edition
Deborah Levy Press Reviews
'Deborah Levy's storytelling is allusive, elliptical and disturbing. Her touch is gentle, often funny and always acute - This is a prizewinner.'
Julia Pascal, The Independent
'Swimming Home is a statement on the power of the unsaid. Magisterial - Themes, phrases and images recur in rhythmic cycles through this fugal novel. Levy's cinematic clarity and momentum convey confusion with remarkable lucidity.'
Abigail Deutsch, TLS
'Deborah Levy has made something strange and new - spiky and unsettling. In Swimming Home, home is elusive, safety is unlikely, and the reader closes the book both satisfied and unnerved.'
John Self, The Guardian
'Swimming Home is as sharp as a wasp sting.'
Christina Petrie, Sunday Times
'A compact treasure.'
Boyd Tonkin, in his round
-up of the year's best fiction, The Independent 'Dark, sometimes humorous, intriguing and tragic, Levy's tale held me captive from its dramatic beginning
Lucy Popescu, The Tablet
'Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression.'
Jeanette Winterson
About Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of highly praised books including Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography (both Jonathan Cape) and Billy and Girl (Bloomsbury).
Author photo © Sheila Burnett
More About Deborah Levy
