The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies

Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches. John Self, The Guardian