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Deborah Levy's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Deborah Levy recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Deborah Levy's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

All About My Mother

Recommended by Deborah Levy, and 1 others.

Deborah LevyAlmódovar asks us: ‘What is an authentic woman? What is an authentic man?’ (Source)

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2
This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag's evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh follows Sontag through the turbulent years of the 1960s—from her trip to Hanoi at the peak of the Vietnam War to her...
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Recommended by Deborah Levy, and 1 others.

Deborah LevyShe felt that it was her job to keep her mother alive, and that she’d sacrificed her own need to be dependant. (Source)

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3

The Lover

An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984.

Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable...
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Recommended by Deborah Levy, and 1 others.

Deborah LevyOut of all the books we’re discussing, the mother in The Lover is the saddest (Source)

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4

To the Lighthouse

For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged.
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an...
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Recommended by Hermione Lee, Deborah Levy, and 2 others.

Hermione LeeWhen all is said and done, I think it is her greatest novel. (Source)

Deborah LevyAristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and you really do see that in To the Lighthouse. Woolf always said that there is no symbolism in the lighthouse at all, and I think we should believe her. All the same, I do think that the lighthouse, in a way, is Mrs Ramsay because the lighthouse is there to protect us from harm and from hazards, and Mrs Ramsay is a self-sacrificing,... (Source)

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5

My Mother's House & Sido

In My Mother's House and Sido, Colette plays fictional variations on the themes of childhood, family, and, above all, her mother. Vividly alive, fond of cities, music, theater, and books, Sido devoted herself to her village, Saint-Saveur; to her garden, with its inhabitants and its animals; and, especially, to her children, particularly her youngest, whom she called Minet-Chéri. Unlike Gigi and Chéri, which focus largely on sexual love and its repercussions, My Mother's House and Sido center on the compelling figure of a powerful, nurturing woman in... more
Recommended by Deborah Levy, and 1 others.

Deborah LevyHaving read this book and most of Colette’s books, I feel I have participated in her fictional childhood. (Source)

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