In 1838 Frédéric Chopin George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They
are there to create and to convalesce to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris
days. Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca the ghost of a teenage girl who has been
at the monastery for over three hundred years. Blanca's was a life cut short and she is
outraged. Having lived in a world full according to her mother of ?beautiful men' she has
found that in death it is the women she falls for their beauty she cannot turn away from and
it is the women and girls who over her centuries in the village and at the monastery she has
sought to protect from the attentions of men with what little power she has. And then George
Sand arrives this beautiful woman in a man's clothes and Blanca is in love. But the rest of
the village is suspicious of the newcomers and as winter sets in as George tries to keep her
family and herself from falling apart as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his
tuneless piano their stay looks likely to end in disaster . . . Heady with the delicious
scent of the Mediterranean richly witty and utterly compulsive Briefly A Delicious Life is
a story about convention and breaking convention about love - yearning secret forbidden
unrequited - and about men and women and the violence they mete out to one another.
