"My favourite debut of 2017 ... as funny as it is poignant" Lena Dunham
When Nell Stevens was given the opportunity to spend three months in a location of her choice in order to write her novel, she was determined to rid herself of all distractions. So Nell decided to travel to Bleaker Island (official population: two) in the Falklands where she would write 2,500 words a day.
But Bleaker House is not that novel. Instead this is a book about a young woman realising that the way to writing fiction doesn't necessarily lie in total solitude and a clear plan. Nor does it lie in a daily ration of 1085 calories, no means of contacting the outside world and a slow descent towards something that feels worryingly like madness . . .
Hilariously funny, painfully honest, and beautifully observed, Bleaker House is part memoir, part travelogue, part story collection. It is an exploration of the narrow spaces between real life and fiction and, in the end, a book about failing to write a novel, but finally becoming a writer.
MORE PRAISE FOR BLEAKER HOUSE
"Bleaker House swirls text, subtext, and context into a single narrative, a mesmerizing literary levitation act ... lovely and thoughtful" Vogue
"It's not only her fellow writers who will be captivated by Stevens's meditative, engagingly comic reflection on the three months she spent working on a novel" Harper's Bazaar
"One of the most original, entertaining, and thought-provoking books I have ever read about the difficulty of writing a book" New Yorker
"Fresh and spirited . . . A delightful literary debut" Kirkus
"An inventive memoir about a young writer's struggle to find her literary footing" NPR Nell Stevens has a First in English and Creative Writing from Warwick, after which she went on to study Arabic and Comparative Literature at Harvard, and to receive a Marcia Trimble Fellowship and the Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Award for her MFA in Fiction at Boston University. She is currently researching a Ph.D. in Victorian literature at King's College London. She was a finalist in the 2011 Elle magazine Writing Talent Contest, and a runner-up in both the 2014 Mslexia Memoir Competition and the 2015 Mslexia Short Story Prize. Funny, warm and wise, Bleaker House is a book about trying, and failing, to write a novel.
