Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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Spoiler alert) Whether you enjoy this book may indeed be dependent on your own mother-daughter relationship and may make you wonder whether you could become that mad desperate mother refusing to let go or whether you should be the daughter who's best ever decision was to abandon your mother by the side of the road! Cal Flyn, our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present. The difficult, ambivalent, precious mother-daughter relationship forms the core of this beautiful, clever novel. Sofia becomes obsessed with a German seamstress, Ingrid Bauer, “whose body is long and hard like an autobahn”, and who stitches her a shirt with the word “beloved” sewn into its fabric – unless, of course, she has embroidered another word entirely. In this smart modern development of the myth, the monster metamorphoses again to become gender divisions themselves: "Where would the Medusa's case history begin and end?

Q The White Review— Beautiful Mutants is also a polyphonic novel, and polyphony is very much a modernist concern, theorised by Mikhail Bakhtin.There are flashes now and again of this sort of poetic interior blaze in Joe but he is slyly disguised as a bit of a brute; all the characters know (someone must have told them) that he would lift a wardrobe with his teeth if there was a beautiful woman inside it. I’ve never personally been a fan of automatic writing, I think it’s shit, although now and again you get something disruptive and startling. Not many books strike a chord, but for some of our book club, Wine Women and Words, Ho Milk made them laugh and cry with recognition. It looked desolate … Perhaps a paranoid personality was lurking to the left of the story they were building for us. Am I to attempt trans-meditational coitus with you – Lapinski who dropped his seed somewhere in me, like the male fish who carries eggs in his mouth?

A thrilling and propulsive novel of an Antarctica expedition gone wrong and its far-reaching consequences for the explorers and their families "leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story" (Hilary Mantel). This book highlighted the deep love and understanding Sophia and Rose had for each other, the sense of loyalty Sophia showed towards her mother, and the transfer of control from mother to daughter as the book progressed. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Indeed, Sofia’s body is literally covered in jellyfish stings (the word ‘Medusa’ being the Greek word for jellyfish( – the result of ignoring the red flags warning of jellyfish in the sea whilst swimming in Spain.This book was open to each individuals own interpretations according to our own past experiences and relationships which was very interesting to discuss. The language is beautiful, striking metaphors and deeper meaning but I didn't really connect with the characters and found it lacking in plot. This action of dismantling and packing up a long life lived together seemed to flip time into a weird shape; a flashback to leaving South Africa, the country of my birth, when I was nine years old, and a flash forward to an unknown life I was yet to live at 50. It means that gender is an aspect of identity that we acquire: we work with or against mainstream cultural interpretations of being female and male. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood.

It was where her husband, the late, great poet Adrian Mitchell, had sometimes written in the spring and summer.What I like to do when I begin is have the beginning, and the end, and both of those might change, and probably will change, but I can then better see the space between that start in Costa Coffee, and that calf suckling a cow, and it just interests me enough to start. As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I don’t recommend anyone try this at home, and I would never recommend it to my students, but somehow it’s an added thrill of writing, to lose a whole page of writing. Celia knew I was financially supporting “quite a crowd”, as she put it, so we sealed a manageable deal over a glass of the Havana rum she had a liking for, and which she preferred to mix with Coke.