Real Estate: A Living Autobiography

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, TIME.com, and Kirkus
A Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year
A USA Today Book Not to Miss
A LitHub Best-Reviewed Book of the Year

The final installment in three-time Booker Prize nominated Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography—a boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it.

“Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A love story.”

Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one’s own. Now, in Real Estate, acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it.

In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of the poetics and politics of ownership. Her inventory of possessions, real and imagined, pushes readers to question our cultural understanding of belonging and belongings and to consider the value of a woman’s intellectual and personal life.

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory, Real Estate is a brilliant, compulsively readable narrative about the search for home.