Deborah Levy has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.8★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is The Cost of Living.
The Cost of Living
Summary
To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of "The Family House" in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. The Cost of Living explores the subtle erasure of women's names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this "living autobiography" infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? Levy draws on her own experience of attempting to live with pleasure, value, and meaning - the making of a new kind of family home, the challenges of her mother's death - and those of women she meets in everyday life, from a young female traveler reading in a bar who suppresses her own words while she deflects an older man's advances to a particularly brilliant student to a kindly and ruthless octogenarian book seller who offers the author a place to write at a difficult time in her life. The Cost of Living is urgent, essential listening, a crystalline manifesto for turbulent times.
©2018 Deborah Levy (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Hot Milk
Summary
"I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim?" Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant - their very last chance - in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Sofia's mother's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective - tracking her mother's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain - deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.
©2016 Deborah Levy (P)2016 Dreamscape Media, LLC
The Man Who Saw Everything
Summary
Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize Finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award Longlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction An electrifying and audacious novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness by Deborah Levy, two-time Man Booker Prize finalist. It is 1988, and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life - and this story of good intentions and reckless actions. The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries - feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present - to reveal the full spectrum of our world.
©2019 Deborah Levy (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada