Stein looms large in the contemporary imagination, despite not coming to prominence in her own lifetime until her last decade or so. In London, Stein is reflected in the concept of trendy restaurant and bakery Toklas, opened in 2021 by the founders of Frieze. And now, thanks to Levy, she can be found on the new fiction table of seemingly every bricks-and-mortar bookshop. “Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century,” she writes. It seems that even a year with Gertrude Stein, or a few days with Levy’s slim novel, is not time enough to find out.