My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

Wonderfully entertaining . . . a witty scherzo of a “fiction” . . . We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong

Wonderfully entertaining . . . a witty scherzo of a “fiction” . . . We are not to assume that the narrator is Levy – this is “a fiction”, after all – but of one thing we can be certain. Eva may announce that the essay on Stein will never get written, but here it is – odd, inventive and wonderfully entertaining – triumphantly proving her wrong

Deborah Levy is that rare thing: an author who has mastered fiction and non-fiction. Here she does each with a fictionalised account of real events in the life of the American writer Gertrude Stein. It sounds impossibly chic

Run away to Paris with this delightful adventure of friendship that follows narrator Deborah with friends Eva and Fanny as they cook, walk, read and ask who was Gertrude Stein? This exploration of the American poet and art collector who was friends with Picasso and Hemingway is truly a delight

Fans of Deborah Levy won’t be disappointed by her latest novel, ostensibly an exploration into the life and work of American avant-garde poet and thinker Gertrude Stein, but at its heart, a story about how we choose to navigate our own lives and anxieties. You don’t need to know much, if anything, about Stein to become immediately swept up in the story . . . Levy ruminates on the pleasures and sorrows of friendship and how our own stories evolve

A boundary pushing work of which the modernist would be proud . . . It is playful, experimental, formally innovative yet also grounded in a realist approach. It is original. As Levy’s narrator observes of Stein: “Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen" . . . A compelling contemporary fiction

The brilliant Deborah Levy returns with a new novel that spills over the boundaries of its genre. On the fictional side is the unnamed narrator, discovering herself in the context of new friends, new experiences and a new country. But rising from this narrative is an exploration of a real life literary legend, as the narrator studies the life and work of the modernist icon Gertrude Stein. The result is a stunning portrait of two time periods and two women, fictional and otherwise, seen through the lenses of each other

A brilliant sketch of what Stein termed a ‘lost generation' and an intelligent meditation on the peculiarly modern impossibility of truly knowing one another – or ourselves – and the imperative to keep trying

Levy's writing is eccentric, intelligent and capacious

There are many of us who read everything Deborah Levy writes. Devotees will be delighted toget hold of My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein . It’s both aportrait of the influential Stein and a fictional story, as Levy’s narrator heads to the Left Bank toexplore the godmother of modernism and mentor to everyone from F Scott Fitzgerald andHemingway to Picasso. An enticing prospect ideally to be read with a coffee by the Seine

At first glance, the title of Deborah Levy's next book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein , suggests she is releasing another of her beloved "living autobiographies". But this is fiction, albeit in an inventive form, blending a portrait of Stein with a story of friendship and self-discovery

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue , Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.