Briefly, A Delicious Life
Blanca died in 1473 at the age of fourteen at a hilltop monastery in Mallorca and has spent the four centuries since as the building's resident ghost. She watches pilgrims pass through, eavesdrops on the village below, and learns the languages of every visitor who stays the night. In the winter of 1838, George Sand arrives with her two children and her tubercular lover Frédéric Chopin, fleeing scandal and chasing a cure. Blanca falls in love with Sand on first sight and spends the visit narrating her own afterlife, Sand's exhausting domestic chaos, Chopin's nocturnes, and the slow violence the village inflicts on the foreign household.
Where Briefly, A Delicious Life keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about Briefly, A Delicious Life
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A teenage ghost in 1830s Mallorca falls in love with George Sand and narrates the writer's tubercular winter with Frédéric Chopin in Nell Stevens's 2022 debut novel.
Briefly, A Delicious Life was written by Nell Stevens and published in 2022. It is her debut novel, a literary historical fiction set in 1830s Mallorca. Stevens previously wrote two memoirs.
Yes. The novel is based on the real winter Frederic Chopin and George Sand spent on Mallorca in 1838 to 1839, narrated by a 14-year-old ghost from the same village. Nell Stevens researched the period extensively.
Briefly, A Delicious Life is 1 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Briefly, A Delicious Life takes most readers under an hour to finish.
Briefly, A Delicious Life is a standalone novel by Nell Stevens, not part of a series.
Briefly, A Delicious Life is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.