'Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.' Deborah Levy

A searching examination of all the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy. 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 bookseller who offers the author a place to write at a difficult time in her life. The Cost of Living is urgent, essential reading, a crystalline manifesto for turbulent times.

'Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A Pandemic. A love story.' From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final installment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography' 'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer on The Cost of Living Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. 'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.' 'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise... A brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph on The Cost of Living 'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times on The Cost of Living

"Przedmieścia kobiecości nie są dobrym miejscem do życia" – pisze Deborah Levy, zapraszając nas do wspólnej wyprawy po peryferiach jej własnego kobiecego doświadczenia. Od dzieciństwa w RPA przez nastoletnie lata spędzone w Londynie aż po codzienność dojrzałej kobiety szukającej swojego miejsca na ziemi. Razem z narratorką – która zarazem jest i nie jest tożsama z autorką – czekamy na ojca uwięzionego przez władze w czasach apartheidu, popijamy tanią herbatę w londyńskim barze, naśladując pisarską bohemę, układamy sobie życie po rozwodzie, czytamy Ernaux nad brzegiem Sekwany i rzucamy się w Morze Egejskie podczas wakacji na Hydrze. Levy mistrzowsko przekuwa swoje rozważania i poszukiwania w literaturę, zachowując przy tym dystans do siebie i świata. Pisarską lekkość łączy z erudycją, a poczucie humoru z ogromną prozatorską wrażliwością. W tym wszystkim zaś przede wszystkim szuka sposobu na samoakceptację: Simone de Beauvoir wiedziała, że życie bez miłości to strata czasu – ale co zrobić, jeżeli innych kochamy bardziej niż siebie? Na tom składają się: Sprawy, o których nie chcę wiedzieć (Things I Don’t Want to Know), Koszty życia (The Cost of Living) oraz Nieruchomości (Real Estate).