A Start in Life by Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner's first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. '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 . . .
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-- Tessa Hadley * 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 *
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-- Tessa Hadley * 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 *
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she 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. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780241981498 |
| ISBN 10 | 0241981492 |
| Title | A Start in Life |
| Author | Anita Brookner |
| Series | Penguin Essentials |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2017-06-01 |
| Number of pages | 176 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |