Deborah Levy Books In Order

Publication Order of Living Autobiography Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Standalone Plays

Publication Order of Graphic Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Dalkey Archive Essentials Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy was born August 6, 1959 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is the granddaughter of Lithuanian immigrants. She is a British poet, playwright, and novelist.

Her family emigrated to London in the year 1968, first living in Wembley before she moved to Petts Wood. Her parents divorced in the year 1974.

Deborah was educated at St Olave’s and St Saviour’s School, Southwark, and later at Hampstead School. She then attended Dartington College of Arts, which she was inspired to go to by Derek Jarman, whom she met during her time working at Notting Hill’s Gate Cinema as an usher.

After she left Dartington in the year 1981, Deborah wrote many plays. She was also writer and director for Man Act Theatre Company.

Originally, she wrote for theater only, with her plays being staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, before she focused on writing prose fiction.

Deborah wrote and published her first novel, called “Beautiful Mutants”, at the age of 27. The experience of not needing to give her words to some director, the actors, and designer to interpret, was exhilarating and it made her want to write a few more.

She married fellow playwright, David Gale, in the year 1997. After having two daughters, they divorced.

Her novel “Hot Milk” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Goldsmiths Prize for Best Book in the year 2016. “The Man Who Saw Everything got longlisted for the Booker Prize in the year 2019. “Swimming Home and Other Stories” was shortlisted for a Man Booker Prize and a Specsavers National Book Award for UK Author of the Year prize in the year 2012.

“The Unloved” is a stand alone novel and was released in the year 1994. A team of hedonistic of tourists, who come from Poland, Algeria, Italy, Germany, England, France, and America, gather in order to celebrate the holidays in the isolated French chateau. A woman gets killed brutally, and the eerie, sad child Tatiana says she knows who did it.

The subsequent inquiry into the murder, though, proves to be a lot more of an investigation into the nature of love, identity, sadistic desire, and insatiable rage.

This is a very engrossing and enjoyable read, and one that features characters that are filled to the brim with purpose, life, and feelings. The prose in this somewhere between poetic and cerebral

“Billy and Girl” is a stand alone novel and was released in the year 1996. Billy and Girl, his sister. Apparently, they were abandoned many years ago by their parents, they live alone now somewhere in England. Girl spends a lot of time attempting to locate their mom, going to strangers’ doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman that answers her as “Mom”. Billy spends his time fantasizing a future where he will be famous. Possibly in the United States while a psychiatrist or a movie star, or a doctor to all the blondes with breast enhancements, or just as the author “Billy England’s Book of Pain”.

Together they support and torture one another, barely able to recollect their pasts yet intent on creating a future that is going to bring them happiness to reunite them with their ever elusive mother. Billy and Girl are each and every boy and girl that reel from the agony of their childhoods, forgetting all that they need to forget, inventing they believe are going to be better. They usually just prolong nightmares while they start creating, or so it appears, alternative personalities that is going to allow them to punish and conquer and survive.

The novel works in the way Levy pulls the reader into the implausible, demented world of these two broken, messed up kids who are lost without their parents and it makes you laugh, weep, and puke and stuns you. This is some of the most hair-tugging and energetic prose that you are likely to read about these two teenage rapscallions that live within their own psychopathic dream-delusion.

“Hot Milk” is a stand alone novel and was released in the year 2016. A pair of strangers show up in a tiny Spanish fishing village. The older woman suffers from a mysterious paralysis, looking to find a cure beyond conventional medicine’s bounds. Sofia, her daughter, has spent quite some time playing reluctant detective in the mystery, battling to comprehend her mom’s illness.

Surrounded by all the oppressive desert heat, hunting for a cure to a quite possibly imagined and defiant disease, Sofia becomes forced to confront the tough relationship that she has with her mom.

Readers found this to be a well written character study that is quite an enigmatic, haunting, and dreamlike tale that looks at a daughter’s relationship with her mom and the damage they subject each other to.

“The Man Who Saw Everything” is a stand alone novel and was released in the year 2019. In the year 1989, gets hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine and is able to get and goes off to see his girlfriend, named Jennifer. They have sex before breaking up. He heads to the GDR, where he is going to have more sex (with members from the same family), bury his dead dad in a matchbox, harvest mushrooms while in the rain, and then get on the Stasi’s wrong side.

Then in 2016, Saul gets hit by a car again on the Abbey Rd crossing and is not fine at all. He gets rushed to the hospital and spends the next days going in and out of consciousness, in and out of history. The whole time, Jennifer sits by his bedside. His not-at-all-dead dad sits by his bedside. There is something important is missing though.

Deborah tells an engrossing story. The book is especially out of this world because of her excellent narrative concept she uses. Fans found this one to be rather easy to follow and read, yet still packed with tiny riddles and twists, with the biggest being just who Saul Adler really is. It is a touching and beautiful novel that is about identity and human connection.