**A Washington Post “Notable Work of Fiction” of the Year“A captivatingly strange masterpiece.” —Miranda Seymour, Financial TimesIn a grand English country house in 1899, an aspiring art forger must unravel whether the man claiming to be her long-lost cousin is an impostor.**Brought to her uncle’s decaying Oxfordshire estate when she was a child, Grace has grown up on the periphery of a once-great household, an outsider in her own home. Now a self-...

**Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize'Wildly seductive' –** Sarah Waters'Exquisite' – New York Times'Deeply enjoyable' – Daily TelegraphBriefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens is a historical otherworldly story about breaking convention, and about love – secret, forbidden, unrequited.Blanca has been dead for a few centuries when she falls in love – instantly and devotedly...

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize 2026A Finalist in the Nota Bene Prize 2026‘Casually magisterial’ Guardian'Endlessly intriguing' Observer‘A marvel of a novel’ Ali Smith‘Jane Eyre by way of Patricia Highsmith’ BBC Radio 4‘Puts Stevens in the class of Sarah Waters’

'A gorgeous, wildly seductive novel, shimmering with intelligence, humour and joy' - Sarah WatersLonglisted for the Dylan Thomas PrizeIn 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days.Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for ...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming – a delicious celebration of love and life' – Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell set sail for Rome, a city that would prove to be a place of inspiration and love: she would make enduring friendships, and meet a man – Charles Norton – who would become the love of her life.I...

A girl, a laptop, and a waddle of penguins. In this witty and genre-defying memoir, a young writer can travel anywhere she wants to finally finish her novel—and ends up on a frozen island at the bottom of the world.Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her live, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a bo...

When she was twenty-seven, Nell Stevens—a lifelong aspiring novelist—won an all-expenses-paid fellowship to go anywhere in the world to write. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell picked Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. Other than sheep, penguins, paranoia, and the weather, there aren’t many distractions, but as Nell soon discovers, total isolation and 1,085 calories a day are far from ideal con...

'My favourite debut of 2017 . . . as funny as it is poignant' Lena DunhamWhen Nell Stevens was given the opportunity to spend three months in a location of her choice in order to write her novel, she was determined to rid herself of all distractions. So Nell decided to travel to Bleaker Island (official population: two) in the Falklands where she would write 2,500 words a day.But Bleaker House is not that novel. Instead this is a book about a young...

‘But we were having such a good time,’ I said. That was all there was, all I could say, whether or not it was enough. ‘Weren’t we? Weren’t we having such a good time?’A woman suffering an extreme allergic reaction to a yoga mat returns to the UK to give a reading at her estranged best friend’s wedding; a corporate new starter desperately tries to persuade her colleague to accept that his online girlfriend doesn’t exist; a group of student activists stage a...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, after two years of writing The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell fled England for Rome on the eve of publication. The project had become so fraught with criticism, with different truths and different l...

Hung-over and grief-stricken, a man contemplated suicide at the edge of a cliff, until he is unexpectedly distracted by the sight of a woman emerging from the water below...A group of art students protesting the demolition of a housing block decide to turn its destruction into a creative act...Waiting in her car for the rain to pass after her mother's funeral, a woman nurses her child and reflects on a world outside that remains headless of her sorrow...The stories ...

A collection of stories written in duet.Eight highly original stories, each woven from the joint inspiration of two amazing writers.Sixteen celebrated authors respond, play, twist and develop their story in turn. Without the certainty of being in full control, Duets brings a new dimension to the drama of reading and writing.