Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize
'Wildly seductive' - Sarah Waters
'Exquisite' - New York Times
'Deeply enjoyable' - Daily Telegraph
Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens is a story about breaking convention, and about love - secret, forbidden, unrequited.
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.
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?
'Dazzling' - Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces and Milk Fed
'A luscious, multi-sensory bewitchment of a book' - Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Mercies
'A shining work of art' - Elizabeth Macneal, author of The Doll Factory
'Electrifyingly beautiful, exhilaratingly clever . . . sensual, original, intelligent and brimming with love' - Imogen Hermes Gowar, author of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock
'Hugely accomplished' - The Guardian
'A playful, otherworldly debut' - Stylist
In 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days.
Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over three hundred years. Blanca's was 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. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man's clothes, and Blanca is in love.
But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as winter sets in, as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster . . .
Heady with the delicious scent of the Mediterranean, richly witty, and utterly compulsive, Briefly, A Delicious Life is a story about convention and breaking convention, about love - yearning, secret, forbidden, unrequited - and about men and women and the violence they mete out to one another.
