Book of the week: The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White

Over the past decade, Deborah Levy has pioneered a new form of memoir, which she calls “living autobiography”, said Stephanie Merritt in The Observer. In three “drily funny” volumes that blend memoir with “cultural analysis”, she has rigorously pursued the question of “how a woman – specifically a woman artist – should live in the second act of her life”.

This new volume is the trilogy’s final instalment, and it finds Levy living alone for virtually the first time as an adult, said Susannah Butter in the London Evening Standard. She is about to turn 60; her youngest daughter is off to university; and she is divorced from her husband of 23 years (their split was the focus of the previous volume).

In a “beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life”, we follow the author as she travels around the world, swimming in Greece and doing a writers’ residency in Paris. Perhaps inevitably, given its subject matter, this volume lacks the “urgency” of the previous volumes, said Claire Lowdon in The Sunday Times. Yet at its best, it displays the “hard-won, lucid wisdom” that has helped turn Levy into a “cult” author.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Hamish Hamilton 304pp £10.99; The Week Bookshop £8.99

The Week Bookshop

To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.