And so the book evolves into an experiment with truth and identity. This isn’t a long novel, but it is dense in the way a poem is dense, rich with meaning poured into its simple language. There seem to be no other patients at the Gómez clinic, its outer walls built from marble so that it resembles “a spectral, solitary breast”. Sofia becomes obsessed with a German seamstress, Ingrid Bauer, “whose body is long and hard like an autobahn”, and who stitches her a shirt with the word “beloved” sewn into its fabric – unless, of course, she has embroidered another word entirely. When Sofia is stung by jellyfish, a young man called Juan tends to her injury; she takes him as her lover, too. After a while she abandons her mother and Ingrid to visit her estranged father with his new young wife and baby in Athens, a broken city, even more damaged than Spain by economic collapse; her father, a wealthy man, confines her to a storeroom with no window and a camp bed that collapses as soon as she lies down on it.

Sofia’s body is deeply imprinted with both personal and cultural memories which she cannot erase. Towards the end of the novel, after a heated disagreement with her mother, Sofia escapes the clinical confines of Almeria. Defiantly, she travels to Greece, where her father is living with his young wife and new-born baby, having abandoned Sofia’s mother in London when Sofia was a child. When she arrives in Greece, the birthplace of her estranged father, and therefore the origin of her own lost heritage, she reflects: ‘’Here I am in the birthplace of the Medusa, who left the scars of her venom and rage on my body’’. Indeed, Sofia’s body is literally covered in jellyfish stings (the word ‘Medusa’ being the Greek word for jellyfish( – the result of ignoring the red flags warning of jellyfish in the sea whilst swimming in Spain. Her body has also been metaphorically lacerated by the traumatic events in her life, especially the callous departure of her father, and his unwillingness to look after her and her mother. Nevertheless, Levy’s novel is more than a metaphor for the persistent nature of myth. It can also be read as a strongly personal story about human relationships and the discomfort of being a young woman in the 21st century. The stinging Medusas are not only symbolic; they are part of the dangerous, foreign landscape, which Sofia suddenly finds herself in where jellyfish are not the only threat. Perhaps the biggest hazard is Ingrid, who captures Sofia’s heart. Or perhaps the danger is closer to home: is it the ‘ hot milk’ of motherhood, a natural, nourishing occurrence that through the time begins to scald as a child discovers independence from the unconditional love of their mother. Hot Milk is haunted by the figure of Medusa; the spectre of a woman who has been punished for her femininity (turned into a monster by Athena who is jealous of her beauty) and is forced the bear the scars of her punishment. This idea resonates throughout the novel – the cruel sense of injustice and the problematic presence and effect of ‘woman’. It is the collective bodies of the women in the novel who suffer the most at the hands of men. This, however, hints at the broader problems which grow out of the mythologising of social structures.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Frustrations simmer under the surface of relationships in this one, from the chained up dog on the beach to the human interaction between Sofia and her mother, her Greek family and her new friends. They are much like the jellyfish lurking in the sea and the inevitable stings are both physical and psychological. Reflecting this, Sofia cannot be defined by the structures around her. Her Occupation becomes ‘Monster’ when she is forced to state it in a perfunctory form for a lifeguard who takes care of her on the beach after she is stung by jellyfish. Her options are vast: is she a former PhD student turned nurse to her mother? Is she a waitress? She cannot write her whole story in one line and the easiest categorisation is to reduce herself to a ‘Monster’. Similarly with her mother, her illness cannot be rationally identified. Its abstract nature seems incomprehensible to the world but the true cause of her illness is perhaps psychosomatic. She has become paralysed by the tragedy which has overcome her life. Her bones are living tissue which carry the weight of her punishment: her husband who has left her, the daughter she was forced to raise alone who will ultimately also abandon her.

As a scholar evidently influenced by post-structuralist thought, Sofia is continuously probing accepted truths around her and therefore destabilising her life and her environment; What is a myth? What is a sign? What is a sigh? She strives to deconstruct social myths and does not take anything as a given. This is indeed what Levy encourages us to do through the character of Sofia – to suspend our systematic beliefs and prejudices, to question the world around us as Sofia does. In particular, Levy makes us examine female sexuality and the nature of being a functioning woman in a modern society. Hot Milk was developed by Bonnie Productions together with Film4 and is produced by Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner Christine Langan ( The Lost King, The Phantom of the Open, The Queen). Executive producers are Farhana Bhula, Ollie Madden and Daniel Battsek for Film4. The film is in pre-production and will start shooting in September in Almería. British stage and screen writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, whose work includes the Oscar-winning Polish drama Ida, alongside Disobedience and Colette, has lined up a trio of major names for her directorial debut, Hot Milk. We live in a world full of myths constructed in the past; sexuality, success, education, the economic crisis and our families are all subject to these narratives. A myth has the power to convince people that signs (our names, genders, religious preferences) have inherent value: that a woman must be inherently feminine due to her sex. In Hot Milk, Sofia muses how ‘we are all getting in each other’s signs’ – woman become men, daughters becomes mothers, fathers become sons. She idolises her lover Ingrid, not for the reasons men are drawn to her objective womanliness: her tall body, blonde hair, large breasts. Sofia loves her for the way she fractures the myth of womanhood: Ingrid is strong, rebellious. The duality of her sexuality are expressed in Sofia’s observation that ‘the curves of her body are female but sometimes she sounds like Matthew’. Nothing is stable or solid in this strange land that Sofia is passing through. Myths do not exist – everything exists only in the moment, beautiful exactly for what it is. The Medusa is no longer a hideous creature – she is the protective symbol on Athena’s war shield. We are returned to the epigraph: it’s up to you to break the old circuits. But one of Sofia’s problems is that she can’t see herself straight on. In thrall to her mother, she fails even to succeed in the simple task of bringing her the right kind of water. Preparing for their visit to the Gomez clinic, having described herself as both illness’s witness and its detective, she remarks: “My mother will display her various symptoms to the consultant like an assortment of mysterious canapes. I will be holding the tray.”Our book club (Wine Women and Words) had plenty to say on this one. For some the exploration of the mother daughter relationship touched more than a few chords with its insights into the tensions of the relationship between Sofia and Rose. Did Hot Milk do more than scratch the surface on this though? Some thought so and praised the depth of characterisation while others felt they never really got to know the two main characters well enough. All were agreed on the beauty of the book's language though and the power of the themes that made us think - family ties, responsibility and mothering.