Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's feverish allegory of a first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques--among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture.
In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself.
In The Unloved, a group of hedonistic tourists--from Algeria, England, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, and America--gathers to celebrate the holidays in a remote French château. Then a woman is brutally murdered, and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it. The subsequent inquiry into the death, however, proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of identity, love, insatiable rage, and sadistic desire.
"Written during her transition from playwright to prose, Deborah Levy’s early works conjure fractured and fluid worlds that are wholly immersive." - The Guardian
"[The] novels . . . glimmer with dazzling flashes of fantasy and surreality. These exercises in the literary avant-garde resonate with moving reflections on exile and alienation." - Publishers Weekly
"An immersive, empathy-inducing reading experience . . . Deborah Levy's earlier books are a sonorous, whimsical introduction to the immigrant experience in London." - Huffington Post
"[Levy’s] prose veers from dreamlike reverie to bald aggression in the turn of a sentence, never resting . . . The macabre and the lyrical pile up and cry out with urgency . . . Allows for a deeper appreciation of Levy’s distinctive sensibility." - KGB Bar Lit Magazine