This is how she - and readers - learn of Sand's early, unhappy marriage to Casimir Dudevant and of her sexually liberated life as a popular Parisian author.

She has also discovered a welcome diversion: the ability to enter into people's heads to gain access to their feelings and memories. Of course, Sand, née Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, can neither see nor hear her, but Blanca has over the centuries developed ways of getting attention, such as by knocking over scalding beverages. Lacking other options, they take up residency in the dank, abandoned monastery.įrom the moment Blanca first sees the unconventional, cigar-smoking, trouser-clad writer, she's smitten. She has remained there ever since, deliberately haunting generations of monks and sacristans in retaliation for her premature demise.īlanca's tale focuses on how her after-death existence is dramatically changed when French writer George Sand and her tubercular lover, composer Frederic Chopin, arrive from Paris in 1838 with Sand's two children and her unhappy maid to spend the winter in Valldemossa - foolishly hoping to find sunshine and warmth to cure the ailing composer. The novel's narrator, Blanca, is the perspicacious ghost of a 14-year-old girl who died in a Carthusian monastery on the island of Mallorca in 1473. Nell Stevens' debut novel Briefly, A Delicious Life is a curious mashup of historical fiction, a ghost story, and a queer love story.

Briefly a delicious life nell stevens