The Cost of Living

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 *Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights * Financial Times *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 *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 *

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

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.

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed ‘living autobiography’ trilogy- Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.