briefly a delicious life by nell stevens

Winter brings difficult times, and Blanca can only do so much to try and help them alongside her usual attempts to protect the women of the town from the men, whilst Chopin writes songs on a substandard piano. They take residence in an old monastery, where Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who died centuries ago, watches them with interest, and falls in love with George, a woman wearing trousers and shirts and shocking the local people.

Frédéric Chopin isn't well, but is in Mallorca with George Sand and her children in the hope of wellness and a simple life. sensual, original, intelligent and brimming with love' - Imogen Hermes Gowarīriefly, A Delicious Life is a novel about yearning, conventions, and love, as a ghost watches an unusual group come to Mallorca for their health. 'Electrifyingly beautiful, exhilaratingly clever. 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. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man’s clothes, and Blanca is in love.īut 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. 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.

Blanca’s was a life cut short and she is outraged. Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over three hundred years. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days. In 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca.

'A gorgeous, wildly seductive novel, shimmering with intelligence, humour and joy' - Sarah Waters

Briefly a delicious life by nell stevens