That's All I Know

A propulsive, bewitching novel about home and family, the ache of unrealised dreams and the quiet tragedy of unrequited love.

Nineteen-year-old Lea is from a village that is out of time, out of jobs and out of hope. She and her friends, however, are vivid and electric with life. They yearn, they dance, they fuck, they fight. And around them, a world that isn’t quite our own vibrates with strangeness and threat.

Now Lea is here, sitting on a bench, telling a silent stranger her life story. Because yesterday, change was finally unavoidable.A novel of rural entrapment and coming of age, Elisa Levi’s That’s All I Know bears the traces of Beckett and Lorca, rings with the echo of folktales and has a fierce, unapologetic vitality at its heart. Startlingly odd and deeply moving, it is the work of a profound and singular talent.

‘Reminded me of the excitement, imaginativeness, and inventiveness of the Hispanic literature I studied in college. If you enjoyed the magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, you will be just as invested as I was in That’s All I Know.’ Condé Nast Traveller