Briefly, A Delicious Life: Nell Stevens

Sometimes you pick up a book and it is so brilliant, so exquisite, so delicious that you wonder why you had to pick it up, why it was not thrust into your hands and told to just read it. You wonder why more people are not talking about it, why they are not shouting its author’s name from the rooftops, why it is not in the hands of every reader you meet, on the bus, the train, in the library. ‘Briefly, A Delicious Life’ is such a book. The premise is wonderful, the writing is achingly beautiful, and the characters are impossible not to love. I loved Chopin even in his sick-bed childishness; I loved George Sand dressed as a man and smoking cigars; I even loved the children of George Sand, Maurice and Solange, both hungry for love; and the yearning-for-home maidservant, Amelie; and Maria Antonia the cook who robs the family at every opportunity. But above them all I loved the ghost, Blanca, and I loved her and loved her and loved her. Read this book listening to Chopin – at his breathless best. Read this with the smell of cigar smoke in the air. Read this – just read this. It is absolutely brilliant, exquisite, delicious.

In 1838, author George Sand travels to an abandoned monastery in Mallorca to spend the winter there with her children and her lover, the musician Frédéric Chopin. Their life there, and their unconventional ways, are observed and admired by a lonely ghost called Blanca who has been haunting the island for over 300 years since she died at 14 years old. As Blanca's love for George grows, so does the antagonism of the locals towards the foreigners.I really enjoyed this book. It was easy to read with very likeable characters in their eccentricities and individuality, and it just felt like a nice warm companion of a story even though there were some tougher topics explored in this book such as death, sickness and predatory behaviour.I didn't know anything about George Sand before reading this book and I'm not a musical person so while I recognise the name Chopin, it also doesn't mean much to me. But I really liked learning more about George and her relationship with others, and I admired a woman like her who yes, is wrapped up in her own privilege as a wealthy white woman but still tackled social norms by shunning dresses for suits, and making her way on her own with her writing at a time it was very hard for women to live independent lives.Blanca was obviously the star character (plus Adelaide the goat obviously) and I was amused and intrigued by her in equal measure as bit by bit we get her own story, just knowing all the time that her death is someway related to the monks who previously inhabited the monastery. Her story is so sad, yet one that I doubt is uncommon in history but her life as a ghost was one of guardianship, the occasional haunting and terrorising (or poltergeist behaviour I guess) but only to those who deserved it. I love how this book gives Blanca the chance to 'live again' and explore further than she has done before.

This was a really interesting and original novel. I enjoyed both the main story and the flashbacks into the ghostly narrator's own life. Although I'd heard of George Sand and her relationship with Chopin, I knew very little else about her before reading this book.

Think The Lovely Bones, but with less trauma, more hope, more sass, a queer love storyline and a historical angle... Enjoyable narrative with some lovely prose.Due to sexual content, would not recommend to below mature Yr11.Thank you Netgalley for the ARC

Nell Stevens has written an engaging account of the initially hopeful, later, distressing, 3 wintry months which the Chopin/George Sand entourage – Sands’ 2 children and their nursemaid – spent in a deserted Carthusian monastery, late in 1838 and early 1839Sands, a noted novelist, and intellectual, and Chopin were lovers for many years. Sands was wonderfully shocking and freethinking, not to mention free acting. She left her husband, had several associations with other artists, and wore men’s clothing, smoked cigars and generally shocked the bourgeoisie frequently. She was a true and influential radical.Chopin, several years her junior, was highly strung, and physically not robust. He suffered at this time from that classic nineteenth century decimator of many – tuberculosis. Sand instigated the up-sticks to Mallorca, mistakenly thinking that a winter far further South, on an island, by the healing sea, would cure, or at least ameliorate a condition always made worse by cold and damp.In fact, the venture nearly killed Chopin. A Mallorcan winter provided none of the desired climatic factors. Additionally, the sexual set-up and unconventional behaviour of the couple led to them being ostracised and feared by the localsStevens makes an unusual decision in telling this fictionalised account of the Mallorcan sojourn.Her narrator is an invention: a young girl who died over 300 years ago, and who vengefully – we learn why, during the course of the novel – has haunted the monastery, plagueing generations of monks, sacristans and various other clerical persons. She is an amusing and lively narrator, prone to strong passions and deeply alive to the world of the senses and what it mean to be alive. She is a bit of an eager inhabitator of the sensory experiences of the living. Enamoured of beautiful men when she was living, she becomes utterly engaged by SandThis was an assured, charming stroll through a shared timeline of two historical epochsA very happy ARC request, granted, by NetGalley and the publisher