Real Estate

By: Deborah Levy

Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson

WINNER of the 2021 Los Angeles Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose

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" series.

"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."

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.

©2021 Deborah Levy (P)2021 Hamish Hamilton

Critic reviews

WINNER of the 2021 Los Angeles Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose

“[Real Estate] is the ordinary stuff of modern life, made radiant by Levy’s clarifying prose. . . . [Levy] has taken on the exhilarating, excruciating challenge of trying to produce something new, in life and on the page. . . . Levy’s tone can be like cooled magma, obsidian-sharp. The pervasive sense of emotional control in Real Estate may be a matter of principle—don’t show them how they get to you—but it also reflects Levy’s determination to enjoy her life.” —The New Yorker

“The narrator of Real Estate is drily funny, irreverent, curious, even wise; she makes the reader want her for a companion . . . each of the books [in Levy's living autobiography series] bears several re-readings; together, they offer one version of how a woman might continually rewrite her own story.” ―The Observer

“Reading Levy is to wander through a lush, associative landscape, where time telescopes and fragments of memory or perception merge in chattily narrated anecdote peopled as casually with literary figures—Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Baldwin—as with Levy’s close friends and passersby she bonds with at fruit stalls or corner stores. . . . Real Estate is the newly published third book in Levy’s trilogy, and it has a freshly prosperous tone. . . . Levy has a gift for the pithy, annihilating moment of gnomic insight. . . . her writing is fueled by a constant, analytic sense of quest. [Real Estate is a] rollicking, intimate journey.” ―The New Republic