THE ORIGINAL

The supposed reappearance of a long-lost cousin throws a young art copyist’s life into disarray in 1899 England.

Narrator Grace has been a guest at bleak Inderwick Hall since the age of 9, when her mentally ill parents were institutionalized. With no money of her own, Grace lives at the behest of her aunt, who shows her no particular fondness. She struggles with face blindness—which she attempts to conceal out of embarrassment—and knows that the feelings she “had about women were the feelings men had about women,” which she conceals out of self-preservation. Her singular chance at security and independence lies in her skill at painting. While Grace is hopeless when it comes to original works, she can paint excellent forgeries, which she has started selling to fraudulent art dealers under her aunt’s nose. Into this cloistered life comes what may be a walking, talking forgery: a man claiming to be Grace’s cousin, Charles, who was presumed dead after having disappeared at sea years prior. A delicate cat-and-mouse game between the possible cousins follows, which interrogates the secrets we keep from ourselves and others and the fraught relationship between love and money. Stevens’ second novel—after Briefly, A Delicious Life (2022)—retains its predecessor’s lyricism and insight into the nooks and crannies of human nature, but is even more propulsive. The short interludes on the nature of copies that are peppered through the book (for example, “When we fall in love with a person, we fall in love with the copy of them, inexpertly done, that we carry around with us whenever they aren’t there”) are particularly effective and affecting. Any comparison to Sarah Waters is well earned; readers will be on tenterhooks.

A slippery, captivating tale that doubles as a portrait of a complicated, indelibly queer past.