I gave myself outfits, too: the kind George wore, trousers, shirts, sturdy shoes. I gave myself a swagger as I walked into the room where George was sitting and said, Hello, darling. And George would look up and see me (See me! The thrill!) and say, Hello, you, and we would find that we were speaking the same language.”George Sand reads too contemporary a portrait, feverishly imagined by said 14 yo fangirl in a time when the Internets and fandom forums for, I don’t know, “fantasies [of] having sex with George” were… not a thing. And don’t get me started on Chopin! Can I absolutely discount this novel as Bad? No, but that's precisely the problem. It's not that there's nothing redeemable about Briefly, A Delicious Life, but rather that it never does anything with its redeemable parts. It has so much potential, and yet it simply does not deliver on that potential--a fact which, for me, made it all the more disappointing in the end. Since Blanca is both hundreds of years old and fourteen, Stevens’ prose bursts with the beginnings of erotic excitement. ‘I start to see things differently,’ Blanca says of her adolescent awakening, ‘Courgettes.’ She and her mother find the monks in the charterhouse sexy (‘so much muscle and heft and fat and their lovely broad shoulders under their habits’), but this enthusiasm infuses everything. Blanca’s ability to sink into characters’ bodies - taste what they taste, feel what they feel, hear what they hear - means that a novel by a dead, disembodied character is surprisingly sensory, fat on life: it is about first kisses but also the scents of oranges and rotting pomegranates, ‘the sweetness of a stray sugar crystal’ from an apple tart dissolving on a tongue. A moment when Blanca hears Chopin’s piano-playing exemplifies Stevens’ sensual, synesthetic writing: fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George often finds the demands of motherhood to be at odds with her writing career and ambitions. How do you think this affected her and her children? Discuss the difference between her relationships with Maurice and Solange and how those relationships change over the course of the novel.

The image of a ghost giving herself outfits (sic) to match her author crush is so ridiculously fangirlish to me that Blanca fails to be a convincing historical fiction narrator, even one that’s been haunting the island for hundreds of years. As a ghost, Blanca is able to inhabit others’ bodies and experience their sensations, hear their thoughts, witness their dreams and memories, and even see their futures, making her a near-omniscient narrator. Discuss the author’s choice to give Blanca these powers. How would the story differ if Blanca’s powers were more limited in scope? There was a long silence and then the young man said, somewhat pointedly, “We were carrying things, Mama.” I will also say that the whole "sapphic love story" aspect of this is barely in the novel, so I wouldn't get your hopes up about that.) (Oh, and the ending was so clumsy and anticlimactic; it felt like it undermined what was already a very shaky story to begin with.) our MC, Blanca, is a ghost who I could listen to for hours and days. I thought she was a really good narrator for this story, and it added a queer, sultry element that made this book. she also had her own heartbreaking and saddening story, adding to the overall somber nature of the novel.Stevens tempers this excitement with tragedy, and Briefly, A Delicious Life is also about the ways a body can betray a person, especially a woman. Fundamentally, though, it is that rare thing: a literary novel concerned with pleasure — of sex, and eating, and music, and the pleasures of a narrative, of escaping somewhere else, becoming someone else. Although a local jokes about Sand and Chopin coming to Mallorca for the weather when it is mostly miserable during their stay, the novel itself is sun-kissed, steeped in the senses, and in many ways a perfect summer beach read. As things grow more difficult in Mallorca, George becomes exhausted. She wonders, “What am I to make of life?” reminding Blanca of her own struggle to rationalize her existence after death. How does each character make sense of these existential questions? Blanca has been dead for a few centuries when she falls in love – instantly and devotedly – with celebrated novelist George Sand. George is unlike anyone Blanca has encountered in hundreds of years of haunting: a woman dressed in men’s clothes, a ferocious writer, a passionate lover of men and women alike and an ambivalent mother. That morning, I had gone into the garden to try my hand at swatting fruit from the branches of one of the taller trees, and after that to sneak up on the starlings and howl, which would send them into the air together like a single giant bird. I had it all planned out and was not prepared, not prepared at all, to come across unfamiliar, uninvited lovers. George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited,

Stevens, Nell (2017). Bleaker house: chasing my novel to the end of the world. London: Picador. ISBN 9781509824410.Stevens, Nell (2022). Briefly, a delicious life. London. ISBN 978-1529083422. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher ( link)

He pointed at the portraits of the Madonna that lined the walls of the Charterhouse corridors: canvas after canvas of broad, white foreheads, beatific smiles, occasional exposed breasts proffered to babies with the faces of old men. Those virgins, he said, were the only ones he was duty bound to protect. This novel follows a cast of historical characters as seen through the eyes of Blanca, a ghost who is haunting the Valldemossa town in the Mallorcan countryside. Simultaneously, we watch the stories of George Sand Frederic Chopin and Blanca unfold in a poetic prose that conveys an ever present sense of intimacy. This is a book more about sensations and feelings rather than a central conflict therefore it might be not for everyone's taste, but in my opinion this is a beautiful piece of literature nonetheless. I found myself floored by Nell Stevens' mastery with language, by her deep understanding of the human spirit, by the astonishing freshness of this historical novel. Briefly, A Delicious Life is a shining work of art and Nell Stevens is an original, whose touch is as deft as it is masterful."A gorgeous, wildly seductive novel, shimmering with intelligence, humor and joy. I adored this book." This is Stevens’s third book but her first novel; her previous books ( Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me) were autofiction-ish but have tended to be classified as memoirs. That same playfulness with genre is here, turning what could have been a straightforward biographical novel about George Sand – in the vein of the underwhelming The Dream Lover by Elizabeth Berg – into something cheeky and magical. Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author. Stevens has published two memoirs. Bleaker House (2017) is about a period living on Bleaker Island in the South Atlantic. [3] [4] Mrs Gaskell and Me (2018) draws on her own life and that of the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). [5] Her first novel Briefly, a Delicious Life was published in 2022. [6] She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award, [7] and has written for publications including The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and Granta. [8] pining for a woman who can&#8217tsee her and doesn&#8217tknow she exists. As George and Chopin, who

Chopin began to play. It was something he had begun working on in previous days: a dappled sunlight opening, a break in the clouds, a tentative ray touching the horizon. But the A-flat was running through it now, at first barely noticeable beneath the right hand’s melody, and then louder, increasingly insistent. It became the saddest sound I had ever heard: perhaps you are happy, the music said, and the A-flat, but what about this – this – this. I understood by then that Chopin’s music was the best of him. It was where his loveliness resided. All his better impulses, his tenderness and sadness were there, in safekeeping away from his body, unhampered by the sharp edges of pain and illness, crankiness and frustration and irritability.

A novel of tremulous beauty, sly wit and deep understanding, Briefly, A Delicious Life is an addictive, sunlit delight." In my eyes, the perfect historical fiction must have a sense of time & place. This book did not have that 😅It almost read contemporary. I found myself often debating about the time period in which this book was set. Discuss the author’s choice to use real-life historical figures George Sand and Frédéric Chopin. How does this decision change your reading experience? What would differ had the characters been entirely fictional? I found Blanca's narration to be very intriguing. She not only acts as a watcher like, Death does in The Book Thief, but she also has this ability to directly interact and somewhat influence what is going on in the narrative. Moreover, she is able to read some thoughts of the characters as well as witness their pasts. This is especially true of her approach to George who she is enamoured by. I also found it interesting how intimate Blanca gets with all the characters whether it is laying in bed with them as she listens to their internal monologue for how personally she gets invested in their struggles. I love when you can get to know a character through their style of narration and that is definitely true of how Blanca is written.