My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

'In one short and sly book after another, [Levy] writes about characters navigating swerves of history and sexuality, and the social and personal rootlessness that accompanies both' Atlantic Who was Gertrude Stein? Avant-garde American poet and art collector who made her home in Paris, godmother of modernism, queer icon, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, self-declared genius - a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century. And why does she matter? The narrator of Deborah Levy's latest, dazzling fiction has gone to Paris to find out. There she meets Eva with the blinding gaze, an artist in a long-distance marriage, and Fanny, a sexually adventurous financier; together they cook, walk, read and argue late into the nights. As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks - about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language - how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the twentieth century, and how they look to her and her friends in the early twenty-first. This is a book about how we put ourselves together- an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people. But it is also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world. LONGLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY IN PARIS BOOK AWARD 2026

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.