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My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
- Author
- Deborah Levy
- Narrator
- Kristin Atherton
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Publish Date
- 16 April 2026
- Run Time
- 3 hours 55 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
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.
‘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
© Deborah Levy 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
Critics Review
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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
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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'
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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'
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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
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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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'
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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'
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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)
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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
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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'
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Levy's writing is eccentric, intelligent and capacious
The Times
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Deborah Levy
- Narrator
- Kristin Atherton
- Duration
- 3 hours 55 minutes
- Release Date
- 16 April 2026
- ISBN
- 9781405978033
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Fiction based on or inspired by true events, Narrative theme: sense of place, Feminism and feminist theory, Literature: history and criticism
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin. 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.‘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© Deborah Levy 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
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