Briefly, a Delicious Life' by Nell Stevens is gorgeous, just gorgeous, and effortlessly refreshing for the palette. If you've been disappointed in the fiction of 2022 so far, READ THIS (and the upcoming 'Small Angels' by Lauren Owen next month)! The piece doesn't read like a debut fiction novel. It's assured; it's resolved, forthright. Although it’s a story that doesn’t … go anywhere. Or rather, it’s a story that ends with George and Chopin continuing with their lives because, well, see above re the problem of writing about real people. The book is, however, a fascinating character piece. I can’t really attest to its accuracy but given Chopin is kind of a pill and George is completely compelling I was personally convinced. Having Blanca for a narrator manages to give the book both a sense of intimacy and sense of expansiveness: she is able to directly access people’s thoughts, along with moments from their past and the full tapestry of their future. To some degree she is a little bit of a device, in that it means the book is never tied to a single time, place or POV, but her voice is incredibly engaging and her own small piece of history heartbreakingly banal—a necessary contrast to this story of grand passion between two extraordinary artists that has passed into legend. O'Keefe, Alice (27 May 2017). "Bleaker House by Nell Stevens review – how not to write a novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 January 2023.

Stevens, Nell (2018). Mrs Gaskell and me: two women, two love stories, two centuries apart. London: Picador. ISBN 9781509868216. (Published in United States as The Victorian and the romantic: a memoir, a love story, and a friendship across time)Speaking of plots, if you like stories where there isn’t that clear a narrative direction, where it really is just about characters living, then this would be one for you. winning writer: a playful and daring tale about a teenage ghost who falls in love with the writer George Sands The reason this turned out to be a three-star read for me is that, as interesting as this set-up is, I simply didn't come to care for any of the characters well enough to feel invested in their experiences. It spoke to my mind, but not to my heart. If you enjoy novels that push readers to think, you may enjoy this one. If you prefer novels that let you join with the characters within them, you're apt to be disappointed. Both the novel and the film of Gone With the Wind have traditionally been regarded as canonical accounts of life in the 19th-century US. According to Sarah Churchwell’s bracing new book, it is time to remove the narrative from its undeserved pedestal and examine its problematic treatment of feminism, class and, above all, race afresh. She persuasively suggests that Margaret Mitchell’s story has been inspirational in the worst possible ways, leading to everything from Trumpism to racist brutality and has inadvertently led to an America even more divided than before. Briefly, A Delicious Life

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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? Blanca's afterlife as a spirit able to inhabit people's minds to 'live' through their senses, also allows us to view their memories and, thus, read their histories through glimpses of their memory. As a plot device, this didn't make me uncomfortable. I can see how it might be jarring for some readers, such a convenient authorial contrivance as it is. But I find that I could reconcile that cost with the wealth that it reaps in terms of opportunities to explore physicality and sensuality. Basically, Blanca could take me anywhere she likes, as long as she keeps describing what she sees, feels, smells, tastes, and hears: 'I felt a wrench in the silence that followed. There was something about Chopin's music that lodged itself between your teeth - where teeth had been - or slipped through your ribs - where ribs had been - and became a new part of your body - where body had been. There was something about it that gave you a body to borrow, and let you live in it, briefly, extraordinarily.'In this regard, I would say disregard the blurb about 'Briefly, a Delicious Life': phrases like 'emotionally moving' and 'surprisingly touching' fall far short of the mark for Stevens's fiction debut and, in my opinion, 'romantic fixation' is the very last thing I'd identify as its subject matter. The core of this piece of writing is the impact upon the mind of the physical senses, as all of the quotes above demonstrate. Stevens achieves this in a manner that's vivacious, hefty, absolute, not - as the blurb would have it - merely 'charming' and 'original'. Klaces, Caleb (18 June 2022). "Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens review – on holiday with Chopin and George Sand". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 January 2023. I will also note that—unlike some mainstream reviewers—I appreciated the modernity of Blanca’s narration. The book is actually beautifully written: there’s a precision to the language that allows it to convey sensuality, bitterness, suffering, love absurdity, all with equal finesse.I went into this book almost completely blind and I’m so glad I did! it’s a be Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Three hundred years earlier, I’d seen Brother Tomás with Brother Mateo in that very same garden, beard crushing against beard and the clatter of rosary beads hitting the paving stones. A decade or so after that, there was the boy from the village who sold bad oranges with the boy in the kitchens who made bad preserves. Around the turn of the sixteenth century there was a complex triangulation amongst Brothers Augustin, Miguel, and Simón. And so on, over the years: countless combinations, differing ages, differing levels of urgency and tenderness, but always more or less the same, the kissing and gripping and so often the very same skittishness, the entirely justified fear of being found out, the creeping sensation that they were being watched. Imagine you are about to bite into an apple. Imagine never having bitten into an apple before. The fruit at your lips is an unknown thing. It might burst like a tomato! Yield like a peach! Snap like a carrot! [...] This is what it was like for me, the first time I heard Chopin play the piano.’ My name is Blanca. I died in 1473, when I was fourteen years old, and had been at the Charterhouse ever since. Over the centuries, I suppose, I came to think of it as solely my domain. I knew more about it than anyone else, that was for sure. I knew the generations of monks, and after they left, the great silence of the place. I knew about all sorts: buried treasure, dead-end tunnels, which doors swelled shut in summer with the heat and which in winter with the damp. I knew where the roof leaked, where the rats nested. And still, for all my expertise, there was no sign whatsoever of where these two people had sprung from: the same old corridors, same echoes, same spiders crawling from beam to beam across the ceiling. I was wrong-footed.

Stevens, Nell (2017). Bleaker house: chasing my novel to the end of the world. London: Picador. ISBN 9781509824410. George and her family clash with the villagers several times throughout the novel. Did you sympathize with one group over the other? What grievances did you feel were justified? Do you think a resolution could have been reached? It is 1838, and George has come to the island of Mallorca with her ailing lover, Frédéric Chopin. As the weather and the locals turn against this strange couple, can the love of a teenage ghost keep them from disaster? 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 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).Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing—the impossible love of a teenage ghost 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, nineteenth-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involve an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training). Charming, original, and surprisingly touching, Briefly, A Delicious Life is a powerful story about romantic fixation and a meditation on creativity.