The Original

by Nell Stevens

‘There was a painting my family set on fire. It burned to ashes, and then it came back.’

Oxfordshire, 1899. Grace Inderwick grows up on the peripheries of a once-great household, an unwanted guest in her uncle’s home. She has unusual skills and unusual predilections: for painting, though faces elude her; for lurking in the shadows; for other girls.

Then a letter arrives, postmarked Saint Helena. After years missing at sea, Grace’s cousin Charles is ready to come home. When Charles returns, unrecognisable and uncanny, a rift emerges between those who claim he is an imposter and Grace’s aunt, who insists he is her son. And Grace, whose intimate knowledge of forgeries is her own closely-guarded secret, must decide who and what to believe in, and what kind of life she wants to live.

Deftly-plotted and shimmering with Nell Stevens’s distinctive intelligence, style and wit, THE ORIGINAL is a novel about the value of authenticity in art and in love, and what it means to be a true original.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Mystery, Historical, Queer, LGBT, Art

390 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 2025

About the author

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. She is the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me (UK) / The Victorian & the Romantic (US/CAN), which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, 2018. Her writing is 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 of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.