"Am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?"

Honestly, it was the striking image on the cover of this book that really grabbed my attention. Amongst all the table top displays of 'summer reads' there was something about the isolation of the girl in the photograph that made the book stand apart.

Booker shortlisted author Deborah Levy's novel Hot Milk concerns Sophie, a twenty something woman who moves from West London to southern Spain to look after her dependant mother who is undergoing treatment for a mysterious illness at a private clinic. Sophie is an anthropology graduate whose academic skills are not exactly being put to use in her job as a barista in West London. Instead her curiosity is channeled into understanding her own relationship with her sick and controlling mother and distant and estranged father.

We first meet Sophie as a young lifeguard, Juan, administers emergency treatment when she is stung by a jelly fish. Sophie's wounds are treated at various times in the novel by different hands dependent upon her need to connect with the people around her. Turning at times to both Juan and Ingrid, a German woman 'whose body is long and hard like an autobahn"; both relationships reflect the loneliness at the heart of the character. 

Characters come and go in the novel but it is this loneliness that really resonated to me in Levy's writing. Here is a character torn between duty to her mother and and over riding need to escape her own confines. The scorching heat of southern Spain and the burning sores of her jelly fish stings raise the tension to an unbearable level.

I really enjoyed this novel with its rich metaphors, repeating visual motifs (such as the greek mythology inspired medusa and starry apple desktop skies) and locations that subverted the standard Mediterranean holiday settings. From the creepy marble clad clinic in Almeria to the urban heave of Syntagma Square in Athens, this couldn't be further from the glossy images in the holiday brochures.

I read this novel on Kindle in part in Hyde Park at the Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion. 

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, published by Penguin, 220 pages