An electrifying novel about beauty, envy, and carelessness from Deborah Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home. It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life. The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine,
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“There are lyrical passages about lake swimming, cold white wine and pasta restaurants in Soho alongside intense psychological probing of childhood, parental duty and sexual attraction. It’s clever, raw, and it doesn’t play by any rules.”
— London Evening Standard
“Electrifying…The novel explores both what we see and what we miss until the past and present are staring directly at us.”
— Sunday Times (London)“The novel…raises questions about memory, clairvoyance and history.”
— New York Times Book ReviewBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels and two volumes of memoir. Both Swimming Home and Hot Milk were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Black Vodka, was nominated for the International Frank O’Connor short-story award and was broadcast on BBC Radio 4, as were her acclaimed dramatizations of Freud’s iconic case studies, Dora and The Wolfman. She has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and her pioneering theater writing is collected in Levy: Plays 1. She is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
George Blagden is a voice artist and Earphones Award–winning narrator.