Briefly, A Delicious Life

Description

Briefly, A Delicious Life tells the story of Frederic Chopin and George Sand's brief and mostly disastrous stay in an empty monastery in Valldemossa in Mallorca in 1838. The novel is narrated by Blanca, the ghost of a girl who has been at the monastery ever since her death over 300 years previously. Blanca's is a life cut short and she is outraged. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of 'beautiful men', she has found that in death it is the women she falls for, their beauty she cannot turn away from, and it is the women and girls who, over her centuries in the village and at the monastery, she has sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has - bread crumbs in a soup here (for her gluten-intolerant victim), a knocked ink pot there, and once even a heart attack. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man's clothes, and Blanca is in love. Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens is richly witty and enormously moving. It is a novel about convention and breaking convention, about love - yearning love, secret love, forbidden and unrequited love - about art and creativity and about men and women and the violence they mete out to one another. For fans of How to Be Both and The Liar's Dictionary.

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell and Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and elsewhere. Nell is an Assistant Professor in creative writing at the University of Warwick. Briefly, A Delicious Life is her debut novel.

A luscious, multi-sensory bewitchment of a book - Stevens' writing rings with wit and surprise -- Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Mercies I found myself floored by the astonishing freshness of this historical novel . . . A shining work of art, but so deftfully, gracefully done, that it was a struggle to stop myself from turning the pages. Nell Stevens is an original, whose touch is as deft as it is masterful -- Elizabeth Macneal, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Doll Factory Electrifyingly beautiful, exhilaratingly clever . . . categorically the most gorgeous first novel I've read in years. It's rare that I come across historical fiction so sensual, so original, so intelligent, and so brimming with love -- Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock A haunting, dazzling tale of all the good stuff: love, sex, music, literature, death, and what happens after. Nell Stevens is a beautiful writer. -- Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed Stevens is brilliant at describing desire * Guardian * Deeply enjoyable, guileful * Telegraph * A novel of tremulous beauty, sly wit and deep understanding, Briefly, A Delicious Life is an addictive, sunlit delight -- Stuart Evers, author of The Blind Light A gorgeous, wildly seductive novel, shimmering with intelligence, humour and joy. I adored this book. -- Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith and The Paying Guests A heady yet poignant story about a queer ghost who falls in love * Vogue * A luminous, beguiling exploration of creativity and love -- Alice Albinia, author of CWEN We know we are curious about the dead but imagine a life lived so vibrantly as to make the dead curious about us. Nell Stevens brings a reader into the strange and brilliant artistic exile of George Sand, writing this tender story with tremendous heart and daring. Here, reader, are the low-lying truths of love, art and time -- Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark This deeply wild debut follows the unconventional love triangle that unfolds between real-life French novelist George Sand, her lover Frederic Chopin, and the teenage ghost who died over 400 years earlier and pines after George from afar. * Cosmopolitan, Best Summer Reads 2022 * This delightfully weird story of loss, longing and love just begs to fill a rainy afternoon. * Good Housekeeping (USA) * Stevens' prose is by turns languid and visceral . . . An entrancing and singular exploration of a fascinating historical footnote and a queer life after death. -- Kirkus (starred review) Stevens' writing is beautiful and evocative of the Majorcan landscape as she slowly develops the arc of Sand and Chopin's affair and elucidates Blanca's life spent in tantalizing anticipation . . . this is a winner with appeal beyond historical fiction readers * Booklist *