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Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens (Hardback)
£14.99
Out of stock
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9781529083422
Published:
23 Jun 2022
Format:
Hardback
Dimensions:
320 pages - 216mm x 135mm x mmmm
Weight:
0.100kgs
Author:
When George Sand and Frederic Chopin arrive at a monastery in Mallorca, the resident ghost, Blanca, falls head-over-heels in love with George - this striking woman in a man's clothing. But the rest of the village is suspicious, and as winter sets in, their stay looks likely to end in disaster.
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.
About the Author: Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, and to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University. She was a finalist in the 2011 Elle magazine Writing Talent Contest, and a runner-up in both the 2014 Mslexia Memoir Competition and the 2015 Mslexia Short Story Prize. Her first two books, Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell and Me, were published in 2017 and 2018 respectively.
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| First Item | 2 Items & Over | |
|---|---|---|
| UK | £3.75 | £5.00 |
| EU | £15.00 | £30.00 |
| USA & Canada | £30.00 | £50.00 |
| Rest of the World | £45.00 | £60.00 |
| Collect in Store | free | free |
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