Deborah Levy

Please note, this event is taking place in The Bookshop, York Street.

We are overjoyed to welcome one of our finest British writers and thinkers to Bath to talk about her mesmerising new novel, August Blue.

Twice Booker-shortlisted for Hot Milk and Swimming Home and the author of innovative and critically acclaimed Living Autobiography trilogy - Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate, Deborah Levy is one of the best when it comes to writing about being a woman. Her writing is exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate.

'If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.'

Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final
encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.

Deborah will be interviewed by Anouchka Grose, a writer and psychoanalyst practicing in London. Her books include: From Anxiety to Zoolander: Notes on Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2018), Uneasy Listening (Mack, 2022) and Fashion: a Manifesto (Notting Hill Editions, 2023).She also writes about art and current affairs and has contributed to The Guardian, Radio 4, and Resonance FM.

'Hot Milk is an extraordinary novel, beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex... Every man and woman should read it' Bernardine Evaristo

'[Levy's living autobiography series is] a glittering triple echo of books that are as much philosophical discourse as a manifesto for living and writing' Financial Times