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My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
Not yet published
Expected 2 Jun 26In contemporary Paris, a narrator and two companions explore the life and work of Gertrude a subversive imagining of a truly subversive female artist.
Our narrator has a lot going on. Her friend Eva’s cat is missing—also, she wonders, where is Eva’s husband. Their other friend Fanny is barely around, and not because of her job in finance; she is tangled up with no less than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator’s life.
She is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early twentieth century. There are the Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels, plays, poetry, and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her daring wife, the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
But so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language? Only a book like this, only a book by Deborah Levy, “an indelible writer [and] elliptical genius” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review), could attempt such an investigation. It crashes through genre to form something distinctively, utterly new—an imaginative, entertaining, and scholarly manifestation befitting the genius at its center. This is My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.
Our narrator has a lot going on. Her friend Eva’s cat is missing—also, she wonders, where is Eva’s husband. Their other friend Fanny is barely around, and not because of her job in finance; she is tangled up with no less than three lovers. And Gertrude Stein is ruining the narrator’s life.
She is trying to write an essay about Stein but it seems impossible. She knows too much and nothing at all about the leading avant-garde thinker of the early twentieth century. There are the Gertrude Stein studied psychology at Harvard and medicine at Johns Hopkins, then quit; curated modern art in her rented apartment that would shake the world; wrote novels, plays, poetry, and libretti that are incoherent and brilliant; felt love at first sight for her daring wife, the subject of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
But so much is out of reach. How do we put ourselves together? What do we lose to become modern? What do we find beyond the limits of language? Only a book like this, only a book by Deborah Levy, “an indelible writer [and] elliptical genius” (Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review), could attempt such an investigation. It crashes through genre to form something distinctively, utterly new—an imaginative, entertaining, and scholarly manifestation befitting the genius at its center. This is My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.
Kindle Edition
Expected publication June 2, 2026
2064 people want to read
About the author
Deborah Levy
67 books3,845 followersDeborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)
Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.
Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
March 12, 2026
she’s so bloody good
January 28, 2026
“Meanwhile, bombs are falling through the twenty-first century upon the living and the soon-to-be dead.”
Deborah Levy seems to be the only intellectual cosmically qualified for the job of interrogating the life of Gertrude Stein from her current place in history decades upstream. As with all of her books, in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy creates a separate realm that exists in both body and mind, the real and the surreal. She drags her hand (and pen) across the border where realism ends, where otherworldly wisdom is waiting to break through and to be channeled by the right writer. Along with Deborah Levy's unique writing and sharp perception, she delivers a thorough biography of Gertrude Stein despite her opaqueness. Only Deborah Levy could do it.
Deborah Levy seems to be the only intellectual cosmically qualified for the job of interrogating the life of Gertrude Stein from her current place in history decades upstream. As with all of her books, in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy creates a separate realm that exists in both body and mind, the real and the surreal. She drags her hand (and pen) across the border where realism ends, where otherworldly wisdom is waiting to break through and to be channeled by the right writer. Along with Deborah Levy's unique writing and sharp perception, she delivers a thorough biography of Gertrude Stein despite her opaqueness. Only Deborah Levy could do it.
February 26, 2026
love my girl deb lev
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I wanted my essay to be a clear stream, but there was so much going on. A lost cat, Eva’s missing husband, the vast menu of Fanny’s erotic conquests, finding my way around Paris, the temptation to put down Stein’s writing and read Georges Simenon instead. The streams were flowing through the nineteenth century into the twenty-first and all over the place. Were they streams of consciousness? For some reason I felt the need to defend Gertrude Stein. Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.
In the TLS's twenty questions, when asked what author or book she thought was most underrated, Levy replied: "Gertrude Stein. Her prose is baffling, beguiling, boring, brilliant – in equal measure. All students of Modernism should be pointed to her writing. It took me a while to understand the ways in which her long psychology training at Radcliffe College (under the tutorship of William James) was put to work in all her books."
And in 2020 in the Guardian, Levy said that "Gertrude Stein changed the way I thought about writing autobiography because she so magnificently investigates the art and artifice of the genre", crediting The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as influencing her own living autobiographies trilogy.
I'm not sure how much, if any, of 'My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein' is autobiographical, but in it Levy creatively uses the novel form to essentially write an essay on Stein's time in Paris.
The ostensible framing device of the novel has the first-person narrator, a published author who is, in her words, 'not entirely British', living in Paris researching an essay on Stein. It opens in November 2024, with the US election approaching, with the author's friend Eva calling to say that her cat has gone missing.
The whole drama, which was a tragedy for Eva, was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all. Stein had put so much in my way. In the way of understanding. She didn’t believe in it. Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops. She longed for readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found. She was ashamed of her bestselling autobiography because it was so understandable. When I look at photographs of her, I cannot get into her eyes. Sometimes I had to remind myself of the basic facts, so lost was I in the swirl of information about her.
Which allows the author (both Levy and the fictional one) to then revert to Stein's biography and also comment extensively on her work and her pivotal part in the modernist movement in both literature and art.
Her wish to kill the nineteenth century still leaves an afterglow of radical resistance in our own century. How did she kill the nineteenth century? With her pen. After writing her more conventional early trio of novellas, Three Lives, she poked her pen under the bonnet of the nineteenth century and whipped it off. And then she set to work on the shawl.
In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, written in 1815, Miss Bates (described wittily by Austen as ‘a great talker upon little matters’) insists that her mother wear a shawl when she goes visiting.
[...]
Stein killed this nineteenth-century shawl in her collection of prose poems, Tender Buttons, published in 1914.
Tender Buttons is a key reference point for the novel, alongside many of her other works, which the novel quotes from at regular interviews, as well as from many other modernist writers, Woolf in particular.
The line from Tender Buttons "The wind, what is it" seems to be one key reference point - and the phrase "lost it" (e.g. Eva refers to her cat as 'it' although one of Eva's friends renamed it Bob) and "What is it?" reoccur through the novel, although Stein's original formulation did not include a question mark:
She had a science training and possessed a scholarly grip on grammar, yet removed all question marks from her work because she said it was obvious when something is a question. She found them revolting. And she thought commas were servile. Readers should be free to take a breath whenever they felt like it. Her main aim was for a sentence to push onwards.
‘A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it . . .’
Lectures in America (1935) by Gertrude Stein
The framing device of the Paris plot - the lost cat and the tangled love lives of the author's friends - is rather insubstantial and told in an arch tone, although the descriptions of cheese and pâtisseries made me want to return to the City. And Levy/the narrator's attempt to link Stein's work to modern politics, such as Trump and (unnamed) wars - Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself - felt rather unsuccessful, largely due to the frivolity of the modern plot.
But as an essay on Stein and the 20th century modernists' welcome dismantling of the 19th century novel, this was a success, and the framing device does make it a fun and accessible read rather than an academic tone.
3.5 stars rounded to 4.
In the TLS's twenty questions, when asked what author or book she thought was most underrated, Levy replied: "Gertrude Stein. Her prose is baffling, beguiling, boring, brilliant – in equal measure. All students of Modernism should be pointed to her writing. It took me a while to understand the ways in which her long psychology training at Radcliffe College (under the tutorship of William James) was put to work in all her books."
And in 2020 in the Guardian, Levy said that "Gertrude Stein changed the way I thought about writing autobiography because she so magnificently investigates the art and artifice of the genre", crediting The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as influencing her own living autobiographies trilogy.
I'm not sure how much, if any, of 'My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein' is autobiographical, but in it Levy creatively uses the novel form to essentially write an essay on Stein's time in Paris.
The ostensible framing device of the novel has the first-person narrator, a published author who is, in her words, 'not entirely British', living in Paris researching an essay on Stein. It opens in November 2024, with the US election approaching, with the author's friend Eva calling to say that her cat has gone missing.
The whole drama, which was a tragedy for Eva, was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all. Stein had put so much in my way. In the way of understanding. She didn’t believe in it. Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops. She longed for readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found. She was ashamed of her bestselling autobiography because it was so understandable. When I look at photographs of her, I cannot get into her eyes. Sometimes I had to remind myself of the basic facts, so lost was I in the swirl of information about her.
Which allows the author (both Levy and the fictional one) to then revert to Stein's biography and also comment extensively on her work and her pivotal part in the modernist movement in both literature and art.
Her wish to kill the nineteenth century still leaves an afterglow of radical resistance in our own century. How did she kill the nineteenth century? With her pen. After writing her more conventional early trio of novellas, Three Lives, she poked her pen under the bonnet of the nineteenth century and whipped it off. And then she set to work on the shawl.
In Jane Austen’s novel Emma, written in 1815, Miss Bates (described wittily by Austen as ‘a great talker upon little matters’) insists that her mother wear a shawl when she goes visiting.
[...]
Stein killed this nineteenth-century shawl in her collection of prose poems, Tender Buttons, published in 1914.
Tender Buttons is a key reference point for the novel, alongside many of her other works, which the novel quotes from at regular interviews, as well as from many other modernist writers, Woolf in particular.
The line from Tender Buttons "The wind, what is it" seems to be one key reference point - and the phrase "lost it" (e.g. Eva refers to her cat as 'it' although one of Eva's friends renamed it Bob) and "What is it?" reoccur through the novel, although Stein's original formulation did not include a question mark:
She had a science training and possessed a scholarly grip on grammar, yet removed all question marks from her work because she said it was obvious when something is a question. She found them revolting. And she thought commas were servile. Readers should be free to take a breath whenever they felt like it. Her main aim was for a sentence to push onwards.
‘A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it . . .’
Lectures in America (1935) by Gertrude Stein
The framing device of the Paris plot - the lost cat and the tangled love lives of the author's friends - is rather insubstantial and told in an arch tone, although the descriptions of cheese and pâtisseries made me want to return to the City. And Levy/the narrator's attempt to link Stein's work to modern politics, such as Trump and (unnamed) wars - Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself - felt rather unsuccessful, largely due to the frivolity of the modern plot.
But as an essay on Stein and the 20th century modernists' welcome dismantling of the 19th century novel, this was a success, and the framing device does make it a fun and accessible read rather than an academic tone.
3.5 stars rounded to 4.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I wanted my essay to be a clear stream, but there was so much going on. A lost cat, Eva’s missing husband, the vast menu of Fanny’s erotic conquests, finding my way around Paris, the temptation to put down Stein’s writing and read Georges Simenon instead. The streams were flowing through the nineteenth century into the twenty-first and all over the place. Were they streams of consciousness? For some reason I felt the need to defend Gertrude Stein. Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.
Deborah Levy is a three times Booker shortlisted author – for “Swimming Home” (2012), “Hot Milk” (2016) and “The Man Who Saw Everything” (2019) – the latter two of which were also shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize. She also wrote three autobiographical memoirs “Things I Don’t Want to Know” (2013), “The Cost of Living” (2018) and “Real Estate” (2021) which act as excellent companions to the novels she was writing contemporaneously.
This is her latest novel – her first since “August Blue” (which failed to trouble either the Booker or Goldsmith scorers – perhaps due to its rather odd links to Frozen) – is I would say much more of a deliberate blend of her fictional writing and her autobiographical memoirs and very explicitly and directly inspired by the avant-garde American poet, art-collector and modernist novelist Gertrue Stein - whose late-career breakthrough was itself a novel masquerading as a (fictional) autobiographical of Stein’s lifelong lover “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”.
The fictional set up of this novel is of the narrator (who seems to be fairly autobiographically inspired) spending a year in Paris (starting in late 2024) to research and write an essay on Stein. There she befriends two other women – Eva (a strikingly blue-eyed, polygot graphic artist, whose husband is working long-term in the US and whose cat who she calls “it” – although her friends call it Bob – goes missing) and Fanny (a sexually adventurous financial advisor).
And the novel moves between the story of the three women (which acts more as a framing device – and rather unfortunately for me involves a lengthy search for the cat) and the narrator’s musings and reflections on the life of Stein: both her interactions with other artists (not just the many impressionistic and experimental artists – but people such as John Cage) and her own writing – her experimental prose poetry collection “Tender Buttons” and modernist novel “The Making of Americans” (with its use of repetition and the present participle) being two key areas.
And the two interact fluidly so we get lines (of mixed success) such as: “I noticed we had started referring to Bob in the past tense. Gertrude Stein wrote in the continuous present tense. Eva’s quest to find her cat alive and living in the now meant Fanny and I tried to only use the continuous present tense when we mentioned Bob in Eva’s presence” or “the rind was the frame, this Brie like Gertrude Stein had burst through” - and perhaps more successfully Levy allows Stein’s writing style or famous quotes to bleed into her own writing (there is a recurring riff on the idea of “it” for example).
What Levy captures really well – and is really the source of both her writing (and her fictional narrator’s quest) is the idea that Stein consciously set out to be a discontinuous breach with the 19th Century novels (in the same way she argues that say Picasso did with painting, Cage with music and so on) and as a result changed the nature of her art form (an aside by me – I would say the early 20th Century painters were entirely successful and their legacy is almost ubiquitous in the 21st Century, Cage almost entirely unsuccessful – tone, rhythm, melody still dominate “cutting edge” music and the novel somewhere between – which is precisely why the Goldsmith exists).
And as a final aside one area she concentrates on is when Stein (in a poem in “Tender Buttons”) “ killed the nineteenth century shawl” with her line “A shawl is a hat and a hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a seizer of talks” which she represents as an attack on Austen’s writing on Miss Bates – which of course prompts the very obvious Box-Hill based comment that “It was badly done, indeed!” (or for film buffs “badly done, Emma, badly done).
But this novel – with the exception of its feline-obsession and the odd line like “Her husband lived in Seattle, America. She had lost him. The cat.”- is actually very well done and part of Levy’s own on-going attempt to break through the conventions of genre.
My thanks to Viking Books, Penguin UK for an ARC via NetGalley
we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at Johns Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century. Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress. Get rid of clichés. Break through the conventions of genre.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Yet, is that not what literature is for? To search the hills for greater meaning hiding in plain sight?
Deborah Levy on Gertrude Stein? Absolutely irresistible!
It's interesting that the very title insists on this being fiction as the voice reminded me throughout of that in Levy's living biography series that started with Things I Don't Want to Know. There's a similar intimacy, a sense of the lively mind behind the words, the adventurousness (here living in Paris for a year), the wit and the pressing, probing intelligence that makes connections as it roves over divergent material.
While the narrator is in Paris researching an essay on Stein, the book itself explores almost-contemporary Paris and the friendship of three women there: Eva, Fanny and the narrator herself. The narrative coalesces around ideas of what is lost, a refrain throughout the book: a cat, a potential love interest, but also the things that need to be lost in order for the self to come into its own: Alice B. Toklas' obligated smile, Stein's acceptance of society's rules for women and what femininity is supposed to look and behave like.
Stein ends up a kind of muse for the narrator's own meditations on her relationships with the other women, with her work, with writing and with that sense of the self as a being always under construction, losing and building, moment by moment. That may sound earnest but this book isn't even while it deals with the crux of what living a good life might mean: it's humorous and engaged, as interested in red-soled stilettos and French cheeses and home-made peach brandy (from an Alice B. Toklas recipe) as it is in more serious matters - indeed, it gently asserts that the serious aspects of life are constructed from these small everyday interests and concerns, that friendships and relationship are embedded in cigarettes tucked into a belt, shared meals and bickering over the name of a lost cat.
This is exactly the sort of book that Levy writes so well: I can see myself coming back to this again in the future, as more will be uncovered on repeat readings.
Many thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
4 Stars.
In the last few weeks I have had my poor, simple brain beaten in by the works of two staggeringly talented women. I am not sure yet how I feel about both of these works. In time I will recover.
"You will write about the avant-garde in the language of realism. The push and pull of both constituencies will be confronting.”
A cat of one of three friends goes missing. They orbit each other in their loose support system, exploring Paris, postmodernism, and millennial haze. Where other writers end up with Perfection or a pale imitation of Rooney, Levy explores a preceding unravelling and coping with the death of another -modernism. She explores Steins legacy and art, and in her characters attempt to understand the works of Stein, they find some meaning to their own parallel lives.
"If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein's project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language.”
Levy is equipped to square up to Stein, her prose semiotic-ridden and deftly surreal. Her characters explore the similiarity with how Stein grappled with her past century, she "wanted to kill the nineteenth century./ The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself." In this cosmic-suicide (too grandiose?) her sketched characters still find means of extant amelioration through the everyday; lovers, food, work, pets, locale. It's light, but the backdrop to the dizzying circling of Gertrude Stein is a story of normalcy.
It seems a logical extension of the mode of August Blue, itself an extension of Hot Milk. The vignettes shorten, sharpen, become... grounds for the coexisting of the surreal and mundance. A porthole view of essence. I felt the most comfortable with the middle ground of AB, but I have enjoyed my time with Gertrude Stein and what Levy has added to this.
"… all modernist art was the enemy./ Why was it degenerate?/ It had lost it./ Lost what?/ Representation. Naturalism. Nostalgia. Obedience. Conformity. Certainty.”
In the last few weeks I have had my poor, simple brain beaten in by the works of two staggeringly talented women. I am not sure yet how I feel about both of these works. In time I will recover.
"You will write about the avant-garde in the language of realism. The push and pull of both constituencies will be confronting.”
A cat of one of three friends goes missing. They orbit each other in their loose support system, exploring Paris, postmodernism, and millennial haze. Where other writers end up with Perfection or a pale imitation of Rooney, Levy explores a preceding unravelling and coping with the death of another -modernism. She explores Steins legacy and art, and in her characters attempt to understand the works of Stein, they find some meaning to their own parallel lives.
"If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein's project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language.”
Levy is equipped to square up to Stein, her prose semiotic-ridden and deftly surreal. Her characters explore the similiarity with how Stein grappled with her past century, she "wanted to kill the nineteenth century./ The twenty-first century seems to be killing itself." In this cosmic-suicide (too grandiose?) her sketched characters still find means of extant amelioration through the everyday; lovers, food, work, pets, locale. It's light, but the backdrop to the dizzying circling of Gertrude Stein is a story of normalcy.
It seems a logical extension of the mode of August Blue, itself an extension of Hot Milk. The vignettes shorten, sharpen, become... grounds for the coexisting of the surreal and mundance. A porthole view of essence. I felt the most comfortable with the middle ground of AB, but I have enjoyed my time with Gertrude Stein and what Levy has added to this.
"… all modernist art was the enemy./ Why was it degenerate?/ It had lost it./ Lost what?/ Representation. Naturalism. Nostalgia. Obedience. Conformity. Certainty.”
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Many thanx to Netgalley and FS&G for the ARC in exchange for this fair and honest review!
Well, it's Deborah Levy, who I'm on record as being one of my all-time fave authors (I've read literally everything she's published!) - so I was pre-disposed to love this as well! But must admit it took me awhile to cozy up to it; even for Ms. L. this is ... well ... 'out there'.
She calls it 'A Fiction', so let's accept that on face-value - but it is some odd-ball amalgamation of novel, essay, auto-fiction, quotation montage, pastiche, biography, and probably a lot of other categories yet to be invented.
The opening chapters are somewhat reminiscent of Rachel Cusk, with the unnamed narrator detailing her year-long sojourn in Paris, primarily with the gal-pals she meets there, Fanny and Eve, while researching and composing an essay on Stein, and searching for Eva's lost cat.
Along the way, we get the benefits of her research and pensées about the author, along with generous dollops of quotations from Gertrude herself, and others of her acquaintance about her. Much of this has to do with what it means to be an untethered female genius, then and now.
About midway, it all starts to come together, but never completely; as always, Levy favors open-ended conclusions. There is, however, a very clever 'twist' on the penultimate page. reflecting back on the chosen epigraph, that I found surprising and completely satisfying.
I was hoping this might earn Levy the much-deserved Booker that has somehow eluded her, after three worthy nominations (and it well might!) - but I suspect this will irritate as many people as it enthralls - and might be better suited to something like the Goldsmiths Prize.
It's a quick-paced book that almost demands more than one read-through, so I am sure I will come back to it, once I've had time to mull. But nevertheless - brava!
Well, it's Deborah Levy, who I'm on record as being one of my all-time fave authors (I've read literally everything she's published!) - so I was pre-disposed to love this as well! But must admit it took me awhile to cozy up to it; even for Ms. L. this is ... well ... 'out there'.
She calls it 'A Fiction', so let's accept that on face-value - but it is some odd-ball amalgamation of novel, essay, auto-fiction, quotation montage, pastiche, biography, and probably a lot of other categories yet to be invented.
The opening chapters are somewhat reminiscent of Rachel Cusk, with the unnamed narrator detailing her year-long sojourn in Paris, primarily with the gal-pals she meets there, Fanny and Eve, while researching and composing an essay on Stein, and searching for Eva's lost cat.
Along the way, we get the benefits of her research and pensées about the author, along with generous dollops of quotations from Gertrude herself, and others of her acquaintance about her. Much of this has to do with what it means to be an untethered female genius, then and now.
About midway, it all starts to come together, but never completely; as always, Levy favors open-ended conclusions. There is, however, a very clever 'twist' on the penultimate page. reflecting back on the chosen epigraph, that I found surprising and completely satisfying.
I was hoping this might earn Levy the much-deserved Booker that has somehow eluded her, after three worthy nominations (and it well might!) - but I suspect this will irritate as many people as it enthralls - and might be better suited to something like the Goldsmiths Prize.
It's a quick-paced book that almost demands more than one read-through, so I am sure I will come back to it, once I've had time to mull. But nevertheless - brava!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a genre bending, fast-paced and witty novel - an ode to Paris, an exploration of friendship, a window into sexuality and history and art. And most of all, a love letter to Gertrude Stein, a knowingly unsuccessful attempt to condense her life and works into a palatable and understandable narrative.
The novel follows Levy’s nameless narrator who is attempting to write about Gertrude Stein - avant-garde American poet, queer icon, art collector and (self-styled) genius who has made her home in Paris with her wife Alice B Toklas. She is described as the godmother of modernism, and both her own writing and Levy’s reflect this throughout the novel.
Our narrator tries to navigate the connection between anxiety, rootless existences, language, modernity, sexuality and Gertrude Stein, as well as how these relate to her own life in the 21st century. Stein breaks away from the limits of the 19th century, sharing her unique world view through her art - and Levy does exactly this with this piece of work, defying the predictable rules of biographical writing and instead creating a tender portrait of both Stein and her modern characters.
Can I say that I truly understood the format and the narrative? Absolutely not. But as one of Levy’s characters herself says: “I like reading books I don’t understand”. My three stars are more of a reflection on my inability as a reader to fully immerse myself in such genre bending fiction, than they are a comment on Levy’s skill. I did love reading this, despite my lack of understanding - Levy is a beautiful writer, and she knew exactly what she was doing with this novel. I just wish I knew too. But I think that might be the point…
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a genre bending, fast-paced and witty novel - an ode to Paris, an exploration of friendship, a window into sexuality and history and art. And most of all, a love letter to Gertrude Stein, a knowingly unsuccessful attempt to condense her life and works into a palatable and understandable narrative.
The novel follows Levy’s nameless narrator who is attempting to write about Gertrude Stein - avant-garde American poet, queer icon, art collector and (self-styled) genius who has made her home in Paris with her wife Alice B Toklas. She is described as the godmother of modernism, and both her own writing and Levy’s reflect this throughout the novel.
Our narrator tries to navigate the connection between anxiety, rootless existences, language, modernity, sexuality and Gertrude Stein, as well as how these relate to her own life in the 21st century. Stein breaks away from the limits of the 19th century, sharing her unique world view through her art - and Levy does exactly this with this piece of work, defying the predictable rules of biographical writing and instead creating a tender portrait of both Stein and her modern characters.
Can I say that I truly understood the format and the narrative? Absolutely not. But as one of Levy’s characters herself says: “I like reading books I don’t understand”. My three stars are more of a reflection on my inability as a reader to fully immerse myself in such genre bending fiction, than they are a comment on Levy’s skill. I did love reading this, despite my lack of understanding - Levy is a beautiful writer, and she knew exactly what she was doing with this novel. I just wish I knew too. But I think that might be the point…
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
My thanks to FSG and NetGalley for an eARC of this title, to be published June 2, 2026.
It has been awhile since I have read Levy, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy her. Insightful, casual, and humorous.
This is fiction, or autofiction, on Levy writing an essay on Stein while living in Paris, as recently as 2024. She is friends with 2 French women, and I am not sure if they are real, or fictional.
But the threesome's (not in the usual, sexual, connotation) story, and the commentary on Stein, blend well.
Hmm, I had never thought about that perhaps William James "understood" Stein better than most because of his sister, Alice. James was instrumental in her going off to study medicine at Johns Hopkins.
There were some other "Aha!" moments in here, and a nice plot twist to the three women at the end.
Now I have a problem - do I want to go read more Levy, Stein, or books about Stein?
4.5 out of 5.
It has been awhile since I have read Levy, and I had forgotten how much I enjoy her. Insightful, casual, and humorous.
This is fiction, or autofiction, on Levy writing an essay on Stein while living in Paris, as recently as 2024. She is friends with 2 French women, and I am not sure if they are real, or fictional.
But the threesome's (not in the usual, sexual, connotation) story, and the commentary on Stein, blend well.
Hmm, I had never thought about that perhaps William James "understood" Stein better than most because of his sister, Alice. James was instrumental in her going off to study medicine at Johns Hopkins.
There were some other "Aha!" moments in here, and a nice plot twist to the three women at the end.
Now I have a problem - do I want to go read more Levy, Stein, or books about Stein?
4.5 out of 5.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3.5 rounded down.
I absolutely love Deborah Levy's autobiographical work, and I am never sure about her fiction. In this very short novel (208 pages), we follow a group of women as they look for a missing cat in Paris. The narrator is writing a book about Gertrude Stein; the novel is a mix of reflections on that winter in Paris, and her following the life of Gertrude Stein, with biographical elements inserted into the novel.
The tone was quite lighthearted, and as someone who only knows vaguely about Gertrude Stein, it felt like a great way to learn more about her life. Lots of name-dropping (Picasso, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, etc) and fascinating tidbits of information. I found towards the last third of the novel, the story felt a bit messy and the experimental format didn't work as well as it did earlier.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
I absolutely love Deborah Levy's autobiographical work, and I am never sure about her fiction. In this very short novel (208 pages), we follow a group of women as they look for a missing cat in Paris. The narrator is writing a book about Gertrude Stein; the novel is a mix of reflections on that winter in Paris, and her following the life of Gertrude Stein, with biographical elements inserted into the novel.
The tone was quite lighthearted, and as someone who only knows vaguely about Gertrude Stein, it felt like a great way to learn more about her life. Lots of name-dropping (Picasso, James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, etc) and fascinating tidbits of information. I found towards the last third of the novel, the story felt a bit messy and the experimental format didn't work as well as it did earlier.
Free ARC sent by Netgalley.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein by Deborah Levy is built on an interesting premise, and I enjoyed its blend of fiction and non-fiction.
The narrator travels to contemporary Paris to immerse herself in the life and legacy of Gertrude Stein. Moving between present-day conversations with friends and reflections on Stein’s role in shaping literary modernism, the book becomes part biography, part personal meditation on art, identity and what it means to live a creative life. Paris itself is a steady backdrop — cafés, apartments, long discussions about love and work.
I appreciated the way Levy threads Stein’s experimental spirit through a modern narrative voice. It makes for a thoughtful, quietly stimulating read — a solid three stars.
The narrator travels to contemporary Paris to immerse herself in the life and legacy of Gertrude Stein. Moving between present-day conversations with friends and reflections on Stein’s role in shaping literary modernism, the book becomes part biography, part personal meditation on art, identity and what it means to live a creative life. Paris itself is a steady backdrop — cafés, apartments, long discussions about love and work.
I appreciated the way Levy threads Stein’s experimental spirit through a modern narrative voice. It makes for a thoughtful, quietly stimulating read — a solid three stars.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Deborah Levy's latest novel, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, seems to me to blend fiction with veiled autobiography that playfully blurs the lines between the two to create an engaging tale.
Our narrator is spending a year in Paris, to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, where she befriends Eva, a polyglot whose cat will go missing, and Fanny, a financial advisor and who is sexually adventrous. The novel drifts between the thoughts of these women, their search for the missing cat, and musings on Gertrude Stein and art in general.
Levy's prose is rich, insightful and beautiful to read as always. My Year is another very fine novel, and it is a pleasure to see Levy pushing at the boundaries of what fiction can do.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Our narrator is spending a year in Paris, to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, where she befriends Eva, a polyglot whose cat will go missing, and Fanny, a financial advisor and who is sexually adventrous. The novel drifts between the thoughts of these women, their search for the missing cat, and musings on Gertrude Stein and art in general.
Levy's prose is rich, insightful and beautiful to read as always. My Year is another very fine novel, and it is a pleasure to see Levy pushing at the boundaries of what fiction can do.
Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC. My opinion is my own. This was a charming, unique little book. The style reminds me of a mix between Sigrid Nunez and ON THE CALCULATION OF VOLUME. I wasn't expecting as much biography of Gertrude Stein but it worked well in contrast with the interspersed bits we get of the narrator and her colorful friends in Paris. I wouldn't widely recommend this as I think you need to have appreciation for the modernists, the Lost Generation of writers and artists in Paris, and literary criticism but for those who are well read in those aspects, I think they'll enjoy this.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
*With thanks to Netgalley for the ARC*
I galloped through this book in a day, intrigued by the intersection of past (Levy’s research into Gertrude Stein, her lover Alice B. Toklas, and inevitably contemporaries such as Freud and Woolf) and present (Levy’s life in Paris and her close friendship with Eva, the graphic novelist with an absent husband, and Fanny, a financier with lots of lovers).
There’s a lost cat, unwanted mice, and a hint of star-crossed romance, all set against the backdrop of Montmartre and the Seine. Inspiring to read - Levy is as on form as ever.
I galloped through this book in a day, intrigued by the intersection of past (Levy’s research into Gertrude Stein, her lover Alice B. Toklas, and inevitably contemporaries such as Freud and Woolf) and present (Levy’s life in Paris and her close friendship with Eva, the graphic novelist with an absent husband, and Fanny, a financier with lots of lovers).
There’s a lost cat, unwanted mice, and a hint of star-crossed romance, all set against the backdrop of Montmartre and the Seine. Inspiring to read - Levy is as on form as ever.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Deborah Levy has once again proven why she’s one of my favorite writers. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is an absolute masterpiece. Paris feels sharply observed rather than romanticized, and Gertrude Stein emerges as a vital, questioning presence rather than a distant literary icon. I loved how the book moves between lived experience, imagination, and literary inquiry, exploring creativity, friendship, fear, and freedom with clarity and wit. Brilliant, stimulating, and deeply original.
5⭐️
Thank you to Penguin & NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for and honest review.
5⭐️
Thank you to Penguin & NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for and honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I really enjoyed this book! I found the writing style almost comfortable, if that makes sense? I love books that take place in Paris, and have a protagonist that is researching something or someone in Paris' history. This was perfect for that. I felt a connection as our narrator starts to see relationships, things around her etc., through the lens of Gertrude Stein, her life, and her own relationships. I would definitely recommend this book!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
My Year in Paris... is a twenty-first century love letter to modernism. Through the streets of Paris and her blend of fact and fiction, Levy's prose is luminous, capturing something of Stein's own mischievous creative voice. It's smart and surreal - and for me, just the kind of book which makes you fall in love with reading all over again.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Levy is one of my favourite authors and I think this is a triumph. It's clever without being weighty, it's charming without being kitsch and it's slyly funny in a way that is so incredibly pleasing. It's not only an excellent portrait of Stein, it's a gorgeous portrait of Paris. It reminded me in some ways of Glynnis MacNicol's I'm Only Here to Enjoy Myself as a beautifully modern interpretation of what it is to be a woman in modern day Paris. This is a book I will return to again and again.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
I wasn't sure about this at first and was afraid this would be the first Levy I'd read that I wouldn't give 4 or 5 stars, but as usual Levy drew me into the story and now I want to learn everything about Gertrude Stein and read everything she wrote.
Levy is intellectual yet accessible, fresh, modern, and funny and I immediately want to start from the beginning again.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC.
Levy is intellectual yet accessible, fresh, modern, and funny and I immediately want to start from the beginning again.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Edelweiss for the ARC.
March 5, 2026
So I have tried to read this author in the past but gave up early on. I was feeling a bit negative when I started reading this one but after about 30 pages I was hooked. I now know never to read Gertrude Stein but applaud her comma refusal. This is a rift through Gertrude’s life and avoids all impenetrable work. It is actually funny, silly and entertaining in a where has my cat gone surrealistic adventure.
January 22, 2026
Loved the blend of fiction and non-fiction, as well as the setting in Paris. A great read
March 5, 2026
The most Deborah Levy book ever
February 9, 2026
“Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress.”
Thank you so much Penguin Hamish Hamilton for sending me this wonderful proof. Out 16th April 2026!
My year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a tender, wholly thought provoking and beautifully unique book. I went into this not knowing quite what to expect, with a relatively limited knowledge not just of Stein, but of modernism itself, and this narrative has left me longing to know more about the transformative voices of this era and how an entirely new way of looking at language and thus life was born.
This is a story that blends both the real and the imagined, and it does so with startling brilliance and clarity. Levy’s narrator travels to Paris to tirelessly acquaint herself with the work and life of Gertrude Stein, described wonderfully in the blurb as being the avant-garde American poet and art collector, godmother of modernism, self-declared genius, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and queer icon.
What initially begins as a research project, transforms into an awe-inspiring journey of self-discovery, friendship, desire, amidst the undeniable richness of cosmopolitan living, as Paris sweeps our narrator into the underbelly of a city teeming with art, literature and culture.
As the story unravelled, I found myself growing progressively more intrigued and inspired by Stein’s life, as it became apparent that her way of living and viewing the world was not only ahead of her time, but brimming with wonder, uniqueness and rebellion.
Stein strikes me as being a fearless, eccentric and defiant woman, and a pioneer in language and linguistics, paving the way for writers and academics who have followed in her footsteps since the nineteenth century and beyond.
Thank you so much Penguin Hamish Hamilton for sending me this wonderful proof. Out 16th April 2026!
My year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is a tender, wholly thought provoking and beautifully unique book. I went into this not knowing quite what to expect, with a relatively limited knowledge not just of Stein, but of modernism itself, and this narrative has left me longing to know more about the transformative voices of this era and how an entirely new way of looking at language and thus life was born.
This is a story that blends both the real and the imagined, and it does so with startling brilliance and clarity. Levy’s narrator travels to Paris to tirelessly acquaint herself with the work and life of Gertrude Stein, described wonderfully in the blurb as being the avant-garde American poet and art collector, godmother of modernism, self-declared genius, friend to Picasso and Hemingway, and queer icon.
What initially begins as a research project, transforms into an awe-inspiring journey of self-discovery, friendship, desire, amidst the undeniable richness of cosmopolitan living, as Paris sweeps our narrator into the underbelly of a city teeming with art, literature and culture.
As the story unravelled, I found myself growing progressively more intrigued and inspired by Stein’s life, as it became apparent that her way of living and viewing the world was not only ahead of her time, but brimming with wonder, uniqueness and rebellion.
Stein strikes me as being a fearless, eccentric and defiant woman, and a pioneer in language and linguistics, paving the way for writers and academics who have followed in her footsteps since the nineteenth century and beyond.
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