Nell Stevens

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?

Briefly, a Delicious Life

What a thing it is, to fall in love, to want to know everything there is to know about a person and yet, at the same time, to find the smallest detail – a blade of loose skin peeling from the lower corner of the fingernail – entirely overwhelming, too lovely to bear.

 My brother, my love (this was how my favorite one went, and I read and reread it all the time), I can hear you breathing even when you are not near. This sort of thing delighted me. I thought it was wildly romantic. The first word I learned t was when. When will you come to me? When will I see you? They were always in such a hurry to be near each other.

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