Anita Brookner

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.

But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.

Hotel Du Lac

Frances Hinton is shy and clever. By day she works in a medical library and every evening she goes back to the solitude of her London flat to write fiction. When she is adopted by Nick and his wife, she is ripe to begin her sentimental education. By the author of Brief Lives and Hotel du Lac.

Look at Me

'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.' Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment. Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .

A Start in Life

The Debut

Hartmann and Fibich, two lifelong friends separated from their parents when they are brought out of Nazi Germany, respond differently to the pain of separation

Latecomers

A widow's solitary, complacent existence is upset by family quarrels, secrets exposed, and the advent of a carefree young wanderer, in an introspective, insightful novel by the author of the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

A Novel

Visitors

A widow's solitary, complacent existence is upset by family quarrels, secrets exposed, and the advent of a carefree young wanderer

A new take on French Romantic painting re-examines this fertile period in art history that lasted from the end of the Revolution to Napolean's defeat at Waterloo in 1815. By the Booker Prize-winning author of Hotel du Lac. Reprint.

Romanticism and Its Discontents

A Misalliance

Thrust together by their husbands' business partnership and by a guilty secret, two women form an intense and intimate bond that highlights their uneasy compromises with each other and with life itself.

Brief Lives

"A sus cuarenta años, la doctora Weiss comprendió que la literatura le había destrozado la vida." Ruth Weiss es una profesora universitaria inteligente y solitaria que se ha especializado en los personajes femeninos de Balzac, en los que intenta ver reflejos de su propia vida. Criada en Londres en el seno de una familia un tanto excéntrica -hija única de una actriz de teatro un poco hipocondríaca y un bibliófilo y librero de viejo con muy poco talento para el comercio-, su precoz afición a la literatura la llevó a pensar que en las grandes novelas se podía encontrar la verdadera medida del mundo. Pero ahora, cuando vuelve la mirada hacia el pasado, hacia su infancia en Londres y sus años universitarios en París, piensa que, en realidad, quizá estaba equivocada. La primera novela de Anita Brookner -una de las grandes escritoras británicas de finales del siglo xx- es un relato lúcido, irónico y tierno sobre la contradicción entre las aspiraciones de una joven embelesada por la literatura y una vida que tiende a ser más prosaica de lo que imaginamos.

Un Debut En La Vida

roman

Dolly

Winner of the Booker Prize, the beautiful, romantic and gorgeously philosophical Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner is part of our Penguin Essential series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics 'The Hotel du Lac was a dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era' Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating loneliness is renewed . . . 'A classic . . . a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from now' Spectator 'Humorous, witty, touching and formidably clever' The Times 'Hotel du Lac is written with a beautiful grave formality, and it catches at the heart' Observer 'So sure and so quietly commanding' Hilary Mantel, Guardian

Hotel du Lac

Kitty Maule longs to be "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful." She is instead clever, reticent, self-possessed, and striking. For years. Kitty has been tactfully courting her colleague Maurice Bishop, a detached, elegant English professor. Now, running out of patience, Kitty's amorous pursuit takes her from rancorous academic committee rooms and lecture halls to French cathedrals and Parisian rooming houses, from sittings with her dress-making grandmother to seances with a grandmotherly psychic. Touching, funny, and stylistically breathtaking, Providence is a brightly polished gem of romantic comedy.

Providence

A Family Romance

"Rachel Kennedy and Oscar Livingston were not precisely friends or family. Rachel had been acquanted with Oscar for some time, first as her father's accountant, and then as her own. Part owner of a London bookshop, Rachel is thoroughly independent and somewhat distant, determinedly restrained in her feelings for others, but above all responsible. And it is this trait that leads Oscar and his wife Dorrie to seek out Rachel as a mentor for their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Heather. Yet when Heather seems poised to make an unsuitable romantic decision, Rachel decides to speak out and intervene, causing an unwitting and devastating insight."--Provided by publisher.

Anita Brookner

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