The cost of living

A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century

The audacious and elegiac second installment in her 'living autobiography' on writing and womanhood, from the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home

'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights' Financial Times

Following the acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, Deborah Levy returns to the subject of her life in letters. The Cost of Living reveals a writer in radical flux, considering what it means to live with value and meaning and pleasure. This perfectly crafted snapshot of a woman in the process of transformation is as distinctive, wide-ranging and original as Levy's acclaimed novels, an essential read for every Deborah Levy fan.

'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer . . . Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise' Telegraph

'This short, sensual, embattled memoir is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage, the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer

Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living * Observer *
Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights * Financial Times *
It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself... A piece of work that is not so much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls 'a new way of living' in the post-familial world * Guardian *
Ingenious, practical and dryly amused... This is a manifesto for a risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the same * New Statesman *

Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed should be endowed with a blue plaque

Both memoir and feminist manifesto, her writing focuses so sharply on what it means to be alive that she's given me much-needed clarity...Levy subtly informs us about what it is to be a woman.