We’re delighted to be working with the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing to host Nell Stevens and Jacob Kerr as part of their Literature Live series. Nell and Jacob will be discussing their debut novels BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE and THE GREEN MAN OF ESHWOOD HALL with host Luke Brown.

About the books:

BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE – Nell Stevens

In 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 over three hundred years. Blanca’s was a life cut short and she is outraged. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of ‘beautiful men’, she has found that in death it is the women she falls for, their beauty she cannot turn away from, and it is the women and girls who, over her centuries in the village and at the monastery, she has sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man’s clothes, and Blanca is in love.

But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as winter sets in, as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster . . .

Heady with the delicious scent of the Mediterranean, richly witty, and utterly compulsive, Briefly, A Life Delicious is a story about convention and breaking convention, about love – yearning, secret, forbidden, unrequited – and about men and women and the cruelty they mete out to one another.

THE GREEN MAN OF ESHWOOD HALL – Jacob Kerr

Eshwood Hall is a great English house surrounded by sprawling woods. In 1962, Izzy is thirteen, lives in the servants quarters and doesn’t go to school. Neglected by her parents, she spends her moments of freedom exploring the forest and the village beyond. The more she comes to understand the history of the place and her own situation, the stranger are the things she hears and sees. The most tantalising of these is the Green Man who inhabits the woods, and seems to know all about her, even those desires she has buried deep inside.

A family story rooted in folk tale, The Green Man of Eshwood Hall shows us the power that the wild still holds on our imagination, and the shocking nightmares to which it can give rise.

About the authors:

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell and Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the 2018 BBC National Short Story Award. Her writing has been 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 in creative writing at the University of Warwick. Briefly, A Delicious Life is her debut novel.

Jacob Kerr was born in the North East of England. This is his first novel.

Doors: 6.30, event starts: 6.45

Tickets are £3 or free when purchasing a copy of either book. BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE and THE GREEN MAN OF ESHWOOD HALL will also be available to purchase on the night and Nell and Jacob will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you