The Man Who Saw Everything

Description

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.

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including Hot Milk and The Man Who Saw Everything, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy- Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and she won the Prix Femina Etranger in 2020. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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 * Writing so beautiful it stops the reader on the page * Independent * 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 * Guardian * 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 * An ice-cold skewering of patriarchy, humanity and the darkness of the 20th century Europe * The Times * Charged with themes spanning memory and mortality, beauty and time, it's as electrifying as it is mysterious * Mail on Sunday * Intelligent and supple...a dizzying tale of life across time and borders * Financial Times * It's clever, raw and doesn't play by any rules * Evening Standard * 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) * One of the best books I have ever read -- Katherine Angel via Twitter playful, consistently surprising...Levy brilliantly plumbs the divide between the self and others * Publishers Weekly Best Books 2019 *