Briefly, a Delicious Life

*A Cosmopolitan Best Book of Summer * One of BuzzFeed's Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books*

An "exquisite...too lovely to bear" (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel from an award-winning writer: a playful and daring tale about a teenage ghost who falls in love with the writer George Sands.

In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she's been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants.

Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing--a teenage ghost pining for a woman who can't see her and doesn't know she exists. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George's case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training).

Charming, original, and emotionally moving, this "deeply wild debut follows the unconventional love triangle" (Cosmopolitan) between George, Chopin, and Blanca--a gorgeous and surprising exploration of artistry, desire, and life after death.

Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 07/19/2022
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 8.52h x 5.78w x 1.06d
ISBN: 9781982190941


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 01/01/2022 pg. 8
Library Journal 06/01/2022 pg. 142
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2022
Booklist 06/01/2022 pg. 39
Publishers Weekly 07/18/2022
BookPage 08/01/2022

About the Author
Nell Stevens is the author of Bleaker House and The Victorian & the Romantic, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award and 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.