In The Position of Spoons, Deborah Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her – including a letter to her dying mother and to an absent friend. This volume illuminates and celebrates a rich and varied intellectual inheritance – and reflects on how it has enriched the author’s own work. Taking in questions of mortality, language, gender, place, consumerism and everyday living, the acclaimed novelist invites her reader behind the curtain of a creative life, ‘in which the position of the spoon is always changing’.

‘Levy’s writing is dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll, [and] devastating . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘Writing is self-excavation, a painful digging into the archaeology of our own experience. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in . . . She plunges into the depths, taking us with her’ Guardian