Deborah Levy's 'My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein' lands as audiobook

Deborah Levy's My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, released as an audiobook and reviewed in The Guardian on 17 September 2026, places an unnamed British novelist in late-2024 Paris on the trail of the modernist writer and art collector.

What is the book actually about?

The narrator lives in Paris. She wants to write an essay on Stein. A friend's missing cat, named "it" in lower case, keeps interrupting the project. Another friend renames the cat Bob. The novel blurs the line between literary biography and self-portrait.

Levy, the South Africa-born British author of Swimming Home and Hot Milk, uses the Stein premise to interrogate her own friendships, ambitions and craft. The Guardian described the result as "a gripping vision of a fearless writer" in a piece that ran on 17 September 2026.

How does Stein appear in the book?

Stein is painted by Picasso. She is shown hanging out with Hemingway. She writes stream-of-consciousness prose long before James Joyce completes Ulysses. Her commercial breakthrough arrives in her 60s with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the accessible biography of her partner.

Pennsylvania-born Stein becomes a mirror for the unnamed narrator, who admires the older writer's experiments yet often bristles at them.

What does the narrator make of Stein's prose?

The reviewer singles out a passage that captures the push-and-pull of devotion. The narrator admits: "Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I want to smack it in the chops." The same narrator observes that "[Stein] longed for her readers to find her, yet there was a part of her that could not bear to be found." The two quotations travel together through the audiobook.

That tension, between the demanding text and the demanding author, animates the novella. The Paris setting gives Levy room to layer Stein's salons, the Louvre's Stein holdings and the narrator's own café-table anxieties.

Why does the structure work?

The Guardian review calls the portrait "inventive" and "perfectly paced." Two devices carry that pacing:

• A single, narrow timeframe: late 2024 in Paris.
• A narrator who keeps getting derailed — by Eva's cat, by Fanny's renaming of it, by her own doubts about finishing the Stein essay.

The fragmented research becomes the book's engine. Every digression reveals a new facet of Stein and a new facet of the writer chasing her.

What does the audiobook format add?

Levy's short, looping sentences translate well to audio. The Guardian highlights the "perfectly paced portrait," a quality that benefits from a single uninterrupted reading. The unnamed-author conceit also lets listeners overhear a writer's working life rather than consume a conventional literary biography.

Where does the book leave Stein's legacy?

Stein's late commercial hit, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, remains the entry point for many readers. Levy's narrator recognises that gatekeeper role and tries, with mixed success, to push past it. The audiobook suggests that anyone returning to Stein in 2026 will still find a writer who both invites and resists being fully known — a tension Levy has built her own career around. For arts audiences weighing their next listening pick, the release offers a chance to hear two literary generations argue across a century.