Welcome to all our new subscribers who have joined ‘Writing with the Seasons’ for its second year of ideas and inspiration. For 2023, I’ll share some shorter dispatches alongside our monthly essays and brand new audio courses. Here’s the first dispatch!
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‘Briefly, A Delicious Life’ is a giddy mix of novel and biography. I love how Nell Stevens has made history, poetry and fiction collide to create such an audacious novel.
Blanca, a furious teenage ghost, haunts a monastery in Mallorca. She’s floated here for centuries, enacting small revenges on men who take advantage of young women. When French novelist George Sand, her children, maid and lover Frédéric Chopin arrive in 1838, Blanca is mesmerised by this vivid, unconventional family.
Chopin longs for his piano, Sand writes late into the dark night, and the children peel richly scented oranges in the garden. But the autumn sunlight fades to a windswept winter and anger rises from local villagers. Blanca watches, helpless and invisible, filled with rage, remembering her own tragic life.
This book is a delight for the senses. You taste the fruit, feel thunder shake, and roam around in dreams and memories as Blanca dives into other people’s minds. Stevens’ choice of a ghost narrator allows the story to move between the deep interiority of first-person to a sweeping omniscience. Afterwards, I felt emboldened in my own writing and thinking.
Find ‘Briefly, A Delicious Life’ in our ‘Wintertime Reads’ collection on Bookshop! Writing with the Seasons is brought to you by Write & Shine, a programme of morning writing events and online courses. Winter artwork by Hannah Bagshaw.