The Man Who Saw Everything - Paperback

by Deborah Levy (Author)

Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year By: The New York Times Book Review (Notable Books of the Year) * The New York Public Library * The Washington Post * Time.com * The New York Times Critics' (Parul Seghal's Top Books of the Year) * St. Louis Post Dispatch * Apple * Publisher's Weekly

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, East and West, past and present--to reveal the full spectrum of our world.

Author Biography

Deborah Levy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, widely broadcast on the BBC, and translated into fourteen languages. Her works include the novels Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the story collection Black Vodka; and the non-fiction Living Autobiography Trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, Cost of Living, and Real Estate. She lives in London.