A teenage white girl has an affair with a Chinese financier, and it’s not just an erotic forbidden sexual encounter, it’s an essay on how colonialism messes everyone up. With the benefit of hindsight, it is surprising that her most successful novel to date was also the hardest to publish, eight years after her last book of stories, Pillow Talk, came out in 2003.

Ballard was once asked why so many female doctors turned up in his novels – he said it was because he had scientific training. Cal Flyn, our deputy editor, takes us through the seven books that are set 60+ years in the past and yet speak to the present. Spoiler alert) Whether you enjoy this book may indeed be dependent on your own mother-daughter relationship and may make you wonder whether you could become that mad desperate mother refusing to let go or whether you should be the daughter who's best ever decision was to abandon your mother by the side of the road! Her daughter Sofia has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness.

It can’t possibly be migraines because…’ hoT miLk will be a thriller of symptoms, and that’s the sort of stretch of it at the minute. Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. We get to learn that Sofia's father abandoned his family when she was a child, leaving her as sole carer for her ailing mother. Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Woolf always said that there is no symbolism in the lighthouse at all, and I think we should believe her.

She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991. The waters of Almería’s beaches are infested with jellyfish, portentous refugees from a damaged ecosystem; Sophie ruminates on the conditions endured by local agricultural workers and the developing-world origins of various consumer goods; the privations of austerity economics are everywhere apparent.

A view of the artwork 'You Are Metamorphosing' (1964) as part of the exhibition 'Retrospektive' of Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo at Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany.

Levy’s last novel, Swimming Home, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2012, having initially failed to find a publisher at all.

For Sofia’s trip to Spain with her mother marks a fracture in her life, a life that has been on hold because of her mother’s incessant demands and her confusion of her mother with herself.

I explored the family trees in my joints, muscles, bones, and then I became totally paralysed… statue-like in front of the statue Freud. I have no idea if that’s actually how it’s going to begin, and if the swordfish is going to come in the middle.But Breuer is so fascinating because he discovered the value of ‘the talking cure’ quite by accident, a term coined by his brilliant hysterical patient, Bertha Pappenheim ( Editor’s Note: Anna O. Yet this more conventional narrative form is designed to hold some of Ballard’s most experimental thinking. A divorcee in her sixties named Rose travels to Almería to see a specialist, who may or may not be a quack, about a mystery ailment that may or may not be imagined.