Margins
Briefly, A Delicious Life book cover
Briefly, A Delicious Life
2022
First Published
3.75
Average Rating
320
Number of Pages

A playful and daring tale about a teenage ghost who falls in love with the writer George Sand. In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she’s been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants. Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing—a teenage ghost pining for a woman who can’t see her and doesn’t know she exists. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training). Charming, original, and emotionally moving—gorgeous and surprising exploration of artistry, desire, and life after death.

Avg Rating
3.75
Number of Ratings
9,021
5 STARS
22%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
30%
2 STARS
7%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads

Author

Nell Stevens
Nell Stevens
Author · 4 books
Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me (UK) / The Victorian & the Romantic (US/CAN), which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, 2018. Her writing is 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 of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved