Black Vodka

Deborah Levy

From 2012 Man Booker Prize & Waterstones Author of the Year (Specsavers National Book Awards) & BBC International Short Story Award 2012 shortlisted Deborah Levy

Ten stories from the author of Swimming Home, including the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 shortlisted story ‘Black Vodka’ and shortlisted for The Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.

How does love change us? And how do we change ourselves for love – or for lack of it? Ten stories by acclaimed author Deborah Levy explore these delicate, impossible questions. From glossy ad-land to swans with a sinister sleeping sickness, from London gardens to a forest outside Prague, these are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humour and curiosity, about what it means to live and love, together and alone. 

• There is a sexy hauteur in Deborah Levy’s prose reminiscent of the voice of Marianne Faithfull. The rasping, deadpan delivery of these ten new stories emit a dreamy harshness at once jaded and invigorating.

  Catherine Taylor, New Statesman

• Fabulously jolting, accomplished and uncanny. The strange, unpredictable journey is worth it.

  Alex Clark,The Guardian

• Levy’s sinister, near-private language provides more signs that her work is mellowing… these ominous, odd, erotic stories burrow deep into your brain.

  Anthony Cummins, Financial Times

• Levy’s latest collection of short stories explores love, loss, and betrayal as well as the small cruelties that play out in modern day lives through elegantly conceived and executed prose.

  Lucy Popescu, The Independent on Sunday

• It seems only fitting that [Levy] follows her tour-de-force with this selection of her pared-down short fiction … [her] pen is a volatile weapon.

  Lucy Scholes, The Observer

• Deborah Levy is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction, and her new collection, Black Vodka, delivers the sophisticated and astringent tone her readers have long come to expect.

  Lauren Elkin,TLS

• These tales of unconventional love reinforce Levy’s reputation as a major contemporary writer who never pulls her punches.

  Julia Pascal, The Independent

• Metropolitan and knowingly sophisticated, Levy’s sparse, elegant stories are poetic and faintly surreal.

  Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

• …A collection of mischievous vignettes of Mitteleuropa in the almost quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall

  Catherine Taylor, Telegraph Books of the Year