It is late 2024, and an unnamed British author living in Paris is trying to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, the modernist writer and art collector. The author has been distracted by her friend Eva’s cat, who is lost and whose name is “it” in lower case, which inevitably leads to confusion – has Eva lost her cat or her mind? (Her other friend, Fanny, has rechristened the cat Bob, to make talking about him easier.) The Pennsylvania-born Stein was painted by Picasso, hung out with Hemingway and wrote strange, stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce embarked on his masterwork Ulysses. Commercial success didn’t come until she was in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, a biography of her partner and one of her more accessible books.
Our narrator is an admirer of Stein’s work, yet she can be exasperated by it. We follow the author as she goes to Père Lachaise cemetery in search of Stein’s grave and where she reflects on the lives of other literary luminaries, and on her own friendships. The Stein who emerges in this unusual and gripping portrait is fearless, innovative and, the author notes, “so forward-looking that she never learned to reverse her Ford Model T”.
NonesuchFrancis Spufford, Faber, 15hr 29minSet during the blitz, this genre-bending thriller finds Iris Hawkins, a smart young office clerk, navigating a chance encounter which propels her into a world of necromancy, time-travelling Nazis and a plot to assassinate Winston Churchill. The DelusionsJenni Fagan, Penguin, 8hr 19minFagan’s satirical novel about the afterlife centres on Edi, who works in “the largest soul terminus in existence” where she processes the newly dead and decides where they should go based on how they lived their lives.
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