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 * Guardian *
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 * The Times, 'The 58 books to look out for in 2026' *
I absolutely loved Deborah Levy’s blending of fiction, biography, and existential pondering in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein . . . An ode to female brilliance, to the avant-garde, to queerness, to Paris * Financial Times, 'Best summer books of 2026' *
A marvellously original book, a hybrid of fiction and literary portrait. It’s gorgeously written – like all her other books – and utterly beguiling * Sigrid Nunez, Observer *
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 * Elle, 'The Most Hyped Books We Can’t Wait To Read In 2026' *
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 * AnOther Magazine, 'Ten books to add to your reading list in 2026' *
In this delightfully genre-blurring work of first-person fiction about three friends living in the French capital, each is searching for something, whether her next erotic encounter, a missing cat unhelpfully named “it”, or an endpoint for an essay on the radical modernist writer Gertrude Stein. Here, we learn a lot about Stein, not least that she dressed like a monk, found question marks revolting and preferred to drive with one hand brandishing a chicken leg. Along the way, both writers show us how language – and life itself –can be deconstructed and put together anew * Observer (The 20 Books to Read this Summer) *
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 Conversation *
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 * GQ, 'The books we can't wait to read in 2026' *
Levy's writing is eccentric, intelligent and capacious * The Times *