A dazzling novel exploring Gertrude Stein's revolutionary life and legacy. Deborah Levy's narrator travels to Paris to understand the avant-garde poet and art collector who shaped modernism. Through encounters with Eva, an artist, and Fanny, a financier, she reflects on friendship, desire, creativity, and the cost of reinvention. A witty meditation on how we construct ourselves and navigate uncertainty across centuries—from Stein's early twentieth-century Paris to our own.