Briefly, A Delicious Life
Written by Nell Stevens
Narrated by Ell Potter
4.5/5
()
Unavailable in your country
Unavailable in your country
About this audiobook
'A gorgeous, wildly seductive novel, shimmering with intelligence, humour and joy' - Sarah Waters
Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize
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 cruelty they mete out to one another.
'Exquisite' - New York Times
'Deeply enjoyable' - Telegraph
'Electrifyingly beautiful, exhilaratingly clever . . . sensual, original, intelligent and brimming with love' - Imogen Hermes Gowar
Nell Stevens
Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell and Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award. 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. Briefly, A Delicious Life is her debut novel.
Related to Briefly, A Delicious Life
Related audiobooks
Briefly, A Delicious Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hearts and Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Watching Women & Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nobody, Somebody, Anybody: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Woman, Eating: A Literary Vampire Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Lover's Discourse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becky: The juicy scandal-filled thriller inspired by 90s London Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Archaeology of Loss: Life, love and the art of dying Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Historical Fiction For You
The Lost Apothecary: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Song of Achilles: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tom Lake: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5And Then There Were None Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lady Tan's Circle of Women Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Huntress: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Reformatory: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Perfume: The Story of a Murderer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rose Code: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Outlander Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The House of Eve Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Alice Network: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5News of the World: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Weyward: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The River We Remember: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5West with Giraffes: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5That Bonesetter Woman: the new feelgood novel from the author of The Smallest Man Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Book of Lost Names Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Let Us Descend: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dragon Teeth: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All Quiet on the Western Front Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The House Is on Fire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Red Tent - 20th Anniversary Edition: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow Wife: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Rules of Magic: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery: The Official Authorized Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Briefly, A Delicious Life
15 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wonderful!! Emotional, perfectly narrated, gothic, eerie, sad, sapphic. I want to buy the book now to annotate the hell out of it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I found this poetic in its prose. Overall, really enjoyed it.