Promotional Information

The first novel from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time.

About the Author

Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.

Reviews

Excellent
*Sunday Times*

Enormously sophisticated, knowing, often very funny tragi-comedy
*Financial Times*

How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit.
*Guardian Summer Reads, 2015*

A delight, amusing, beautifully written.
*The Times*

Enormously sophisticated, knowing, often very funny tragi-comedy.
*Financial Times*

Excellent, brilliantly drawn.
*Sunday Times*