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  • Published: 15 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241977606
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $22.99

The Man Who Saw Everything




The unmissable, Booker Prize-longlisted novel from the critically acclaimed author of Hot Milk

In 1988, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine; he gets up and goes to see his girlfriend, Jennifer. They have sex and then break up. He leaves for the GDR, where he will have more sex (with several members of the same family), harvest mushrooms in the rain, bury his dead father in a matchbox and get on the wrong side of the Stasi.

In 2016, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is not fine at all; he is rushed to hospital and spends the following days in and out of consciousness, in and out of history. Jennifer is sitting by his bedside. His very-much-not-dead father is sitting by his bedside. Someone important is missing.

  • Published: 15 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241977606
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage.

Also by Deborah Levy

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Praise for The Man Who Saw Everything

Superbly crafted, enigmatic, tantalizing... Levy defies gravity in a daring, time-bending new novel... Head-spinning and playful, her writing offers sophistication and delightful artistry

Kirkus (Starred review)

An utterly beguiling fever dream of a novel... Its sheer technical bravura places it head and shoulder above pretty much everything else on the [Booker] longlist

Daily Telegraph

An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe

The Times

It's clever, raw and doesn't play by any rules

Evening Standard

Intelligent and supple...a dizzying tale of life across time and borders

Financial Times

One of the big stories in English fiction this decade has been the return and triumph of Deborah Levy... You would call her example inspiring if it weren't clearly impossible to emulate

New Statesman

One of the best books I have ever read

Katherine Angel via Twitter

Charged with themes spanning memory and mortality, beauty and time, it's as electrifying as it is mysterious

Mail on Sunday

A time-bending, location-hopping tale of love, truth and the power of seeing... Increasingly surreal and thoroughly gripping

Sunday Telegraph

Exquisite... A brilliant Booker nominee... Ultimately, Levy is concerned with power – the forms it takes in our lives, the extent to which it is something we both possess and are subjected to

Guardian

Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page

Independent

playful, consistently surprising...Levy brilliantly plumbs the divide between the self and others

Publishers Weekly Best Books 2019

In one short and sly book after another, she writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both

The Atlantic

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Article
Announcing the 2019 Booker Longlist

Winners to be announced Monday 14 October.

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