‘You see that Anna led an arduous and troubled life… Her face was worn, her cheeks were thin, her mouth drawn and firm, and her light blue eyes were very bright. Sometimes they were full of lightning and sometimes full of humour, but they were always sharp and clear.’

Under the grey, industrial skies of Bridgepoint (a thinly veiled Baltimore), three women – Anna, Melanctha and Lena – live out their lives, toiling miserably. With a heavy literary nod to Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales, Stein’s Three Lives, separated into three distinct parts, paints a powerful portrait of women trapped in work.

An astonishing work that toys with conventions from both literature and art, Three Lives stands as a monument in Modernism and experimental literature, and comes from the pen of a writer whose intelligence and compassion bleeds from every page.