"Deborah Levy s Billy and Girl is a narratively complex, tremendously successful satire on contemporary society. Its characters take on allegorical importance, but they are also carefully layered psychological portraits we keenly recognize."

"Levy's work represents an impressive stylistic achievement, tapping I believe at the door of that unrepressedly 'feminine' prose-style which Virginia Woolf anticipated and coveted."

"Levy writes swift and original prose that does not patronize its characters, nor does it dwell too long on cultural criticisms. She carries the reader right through the story, slamming against the back seat of Billy and Girl's Mercury as she whips around corners."

"Levy attempts to convey the loneliness at the heart of human existence. . . A brave and brilliant book."

"Levy appoints her ambivalent quest with distilled images of vital and unsettling power. She is one of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage."

"A postmodern tragicomedy of childhood, original as always."

"Contemporary, slick and sassy, it's also profoundly serious, combining massive abstractions- love, desire, the universality of pain--with the diminutive in a way that's often witty, sometimes lyrical and, amazingly, very rarely trivialising."

"Levy attempts to convey the loneliness at the heart of human existence. . . A brave and brilliant book."

"Angry and uninhibited, Levy's prose throbs its way into the imagination."

"Levy appoints her ambivalent quest with distilled images of vital and unsettling power. She is one of the few contemporary British writers comfortable on a world stage."

"Levy is unsettlingly accurate in teasing out the angry ingenuity of her characters and the damaged rationale behind their behavior."

"Levy is an exciting writer, sharp and shocking as the knives her characters wield."

"She is a writer to watch, no doubt about it."

"Deborah Levy's talent is quirky and exact. She likes to weigh the fantastic with the matter of fact. Each sentence of hers is a surprise, dislocated from the previous one. Sudden laughter is provoked by the unexpected, two sentences so awry that they become absurd."

"This darkly humourous, surrealistic rendering of a primal family drama is also an unsettling postmodern portrait of the hurt and rage of adolescence. . . . Though erupting anger dissolves into, or is deflected by, perverse hilarity, the feeling of menace never disappears. . . .this complex and touching novel explores the themes of identity and a missing moral center with rare aplomb."

"Levy is consistently striking and successful when reinterpreting and creating new contexts for literary and dramatic ideas."

"Comic. Absurd, and always tinged with tragedy, Billy and Girl reads at times like a cross between Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Beth Nugent's City of Boys. It is a linguistically inventive study of what allows children to go on when families collapse and fragment. What persists, the book suggests, is fantasy, and Levy's warped story gives us plenty of it."

"Carefully avoiding the exploitative or trivializing nature of current talk-show therapy, Levy introduces a cast of characters whose pasts are at once sordid and intriguing. . . .That Levy is able, ultimately, to move the reader from simple to increasingly complex responses to her characters is a mark of subtle narrative achievement. As readers, we are initially shocked by the bluntly self destructive tendencies of the siblings, but we are led to understand and then finally sympathize with them . We are able even to laugh, to see humor emerge like salvation into the bleakness of the protagonists' lives. It is a powerful vision, and undoubtedly constitutes an enjoyable and edifying literary journey deserving of a wide readership."

"Picture Judy Blume meets William Golding. . . .An excellent, entertaining selection."

"The novel achieves a fractured, surreal logic. . . .Levy manages to find poignant elements among the debris of Billy and Girl's lives. . . .She gives the siblings remarkable insight and a surprising, cracked sense of humor. . . .Levy's family psychodrama is like a minty-fresh acid bath."

"Movies and comics aiming to be somewhat like Billy and Girl are produced all the time these days, but the vast majority aren't very good. Levy, though, is the genuine article."

"What makes this book so much fun is that almost every event is unexpected. If you can guess where this book will go from the first twenty or even fifty pages, you deserve either a prize or a straightjacket."

"If, by some sick twist of fate, Dickens were still alive and kicking, he'd write like this.'"

"This is a short, twisted, idiosyncratic English tale . .. a novel that beams with a rare originality and force rarely seen on any bestseller list. . . .It's a story that satirizes everything from supermarkets as a kind of one-season Eden to daytime talk shows like 'Jerry Springer' to Freudian psychoanalysis."

"[The events of the novel] take place as though partly within the frames of a cartoon; class rage and consumer lust lend the portraits a biting satiric edge, while a morbid but vital humor saves them from bitterness. Near-conventional realism often trades on vicious hyperbole, the result being a kind of indeterminate, intriguing grotesque. More than characters, 'Billy' and 'Girl' are tenacious bubbles of consciousness, boinging together like tethered balloons."

"Levy carefully contrasts the brutal mess of Billy and Girl's life with a clean, meaningless exterior world. . . .While this banal side of England buzzes around them, Billy and Girl's myths of their childhood begin to give way to even more disturbing truths, as we are bombarded with the answers to mysteries that we didn't even know existed. Mysteries in books are usually used to string readers along, but we do not need suspense to keep us going in Levy''s novel--her powerful language is enough."

"A sourly humorous tale, Levy's fifth novel is a balancing act between the sane and the insane. . . .Billy and Girl presents a close-up look at the shock and instability that follow a family break-up, and the creative way in which two people try to pick up the pieces."

"Levy's strength is her originality of thought and expression."

"Delicate, calm, mysterious, both playful and terribly sad."

"Deborah Levy is a cunning parodist, and also something more than that. These are intricately knotted stories, each with some strange seed at its core."