A richly mythic, colour-saturated tale of mothers & daughters from the Man Booker-short-listed author of Swimming Home. Two women arrive in a Spanish village
- a dreamlike place caught between the desert & the ocean
- seeking medical advice & salvation. One of the strangers suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother`s illness. Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat & the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant & quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront & reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity. Hot Milk is a labyrinth of violent desires, primal impulses, & surreally persuasive internal logic. Examining female rage & sexuality, Deborah Levy`s dazzling new novel explores the strange & monstrous nature of motherhood, testing the bonds of parent & child to breaking point