Book of the Month

Book of the Month September 2023

Quizlit’s Book of the Month September 2023 is August Blue by Deborah Levy. A new novel from the Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy, the celebrated author of The Man Who Saw Everything and The Cost of Living.

August Blue by Deborah Levy

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 preconceived 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.

“Levy’s novels have an undeniable―and undeniably winning―eccentricity . . . They are alive with this relentless spirit of questing . . . We should call her what she is: one of the most lively, most gratifying novelists of ideas at work today.”
― The Atlantic

“Her novels teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes . . . August Blue, Levy’s ninth novel, is her most emphatically uncanny yet . . . This is not a long book, but Levy is such a clever writer, her plot so immaculately packed, that August Blue reads like a weighty one. Everything has a double meaning. Each object, each piece of music, adds yet another layer.”
― Times Literary Supplement

august blue by deborah levy — Get a Copy

About Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy was born 1959 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her father, Norman, was a member of the African National Congress and a prominent anti-apartheid activist. He spent time in the Old Fort Prison awaiting trial with Nelson Mandela. After his release from another spell in prison he eventually decided to flee South Africa in 1968 with his wife Philippa and their children.

Arriving in the UK, the family lived above a men’s clothing shop in London where both parents worked. Her parents were divorced in 1974 when Deborah was 15.

After school she worked for a time in the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill and it was there she met her friend filmmaker Derek Jarman. Indeed it was Jarman that recommended she go to Dartington College of Arts in Devon, where she enrolled the next year to study theatre.

After finishing up college in 1981, Levy would initially forge a path as a playwright. She wrote successful plays, Pax and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Her first published work was a short story collection Ophelia and the Great Idea which was released in 1985. Her early novels were Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography and Billy and Girl. There was also a collection of poetry called An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell published in 1990.
She married her husband, playwright David Gale in 1997. During this time she was teaching, adapting plays for the radio, raising two daughters, and living with her family in a unassuming house in north London. Her writing career met with modest success. However that was about to change, as was much of her life.

In 2010, at the age of 50, the acclaimed writer was divorced and living in a new flat.

By 2012 Levy’s life was transformed. Her novel, Swimming Home – a sun-kissed tale about a family holiday on the French Riviera, was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker prize.

And since then, the success has continued. Black Vodka, a collection of 10 short stories was published in 2013. Another novel, Hot Milk was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Man Who Saw Everything was longlisted. In between she has published three volumes of her Living Autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know, Real Estate and The Cost of Living. In these she considers womanhood and writing with great insight.

If you haven’t read any of Deborah Levy’s work then we would highly recommend you do. She’s a wonderful writer, her prose is unsurpassed and her work is very readable. Levy’s work has a unique quality, it seems to infiltrate the mind. You absorb her way of viewing the world and begin to experience it through her eyes.