Listen to a sample
The Cost of Living
Living Autobiography (Related to this series)
- Author
- Deborah Levy
- Narrator
- Juliet Stevenson
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 5 April 2018
- Run Time
- 3 hours 13 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
Not available in your country
We don't have the rights to sell this audiobook where you are. If it's already in your library you can still listen to it in My Books.
What to expect
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy.
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold it together...'
Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement, and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.
Critics Review
-
Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living
Observer
-
Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights
Financial Times
-
It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself... A piece of work that is not so much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls 'a new way of living' in the post-familial world
Guardian
-
Ingenious, practical and dryly amused... This is a manifesto for a risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the same
New Statesman
See more reviews See fewer reviews
-
Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed should be endowed with a blue plaque
Telegraph
-
A heady, absorbing read
Evening Standard
-
This, from Deborah Levy, is exceptional. A memoir of life, art and separation. How to write when you're broke, have no writing space, are a parent. Also: crushed chickens, electric bikes, plumbing. Out in May and an early contender for one of the books of the year
Sinead Gleeson
-
Both memoir and feminist manifesto, her writing focuses so sharply on what it means to be alive that she's given me much-needed clarity...Levy subtly informs us about what it is to be a woman.
Vogue
User Reviews
No reviews yet.
Details
- Author
- Deborah Levy
- Narrator
- Juliet Stevenson
- Duration
- 3 hours 13 minutes
- Release Date
- 5 April 2018
- ISBN
- 9780241983645
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Memoirs, Feminism and feminist theory, Autobiography: writers, Essays, Narrative theme: death, grief, loss
Synopsis
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy.A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold it together...'Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement, and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.
About xigxag
xigxag is an independent, UK-based audiobook platform and the UK's only B Corp certified audiobook company. We offer nearly 150,000 audiobooks, all with professional human narration. No AI-generated voices. xigxag is rated an Ethical Consumer Best Buy for audiobooks and a top-rated ethical bookshop.
There is no subscription. You buy the audiobooks you want, you own them permanently, and prices start at $13.95. The more you listen over the year, the less you pay per book, and there is always a selection in Listen for Less from $7.95. You can also send audiobooks as gifts using our audiobook gift cards or in-app gifting.
Every audiobook on xigxag has honest reviews covering both the book and the narration, and our community features make it easy to share what you are listening to, discover what others recommend, and find your next listen.
Download or stream on iOS, Android, or in your browser. Browse the full catalogue at xigxag.co.uk.