Books by Anita Brookner

Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier. Alan Sherwood, a quiet English solicitor, remembers back to a time when he stepped briefly out of character to indulge in a liaison with Sarah Miller, an intriguing but heartless distant relative--only to find himself in a series of absurd situations that culminated in his marriage to Sarah's clinging, childlike friend Angela.With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.

“One of her very best…. A pure delight to read.”–San Francisco Chronicle

Booker Prize—winning author of Hotel Du Lac Anita Brookner creates a hauntingly beautiful story of a young woman’s growing awareness of her own mortality and the limits of love.

Coming of age amidst difficult circumstances, Zoë Cunningham nevertheless retains an unshakeable belief in fairy tales. When her reclusive and widowed mother finally remarries, Zoë pursues what she thinks is an independent life: casual love affairs in London and carefree holidays at her stepfather’s villa in Nice. His sudden death and her mother’s mysterious decline force Zoë to confront her own desire for freedom as well as the real motives of the many strangers on whom she must now depend. With lucid, unsentimental prose and witty insight, The Bay of Angels is a vibrant addition to the Brookner canon.

“She has never been more clearsighted, more compellingly brilliant.”–The Christian Science Monitor

“An unusually beautiful and heartbreaking book.”–Detroit Free Press

This novel chronicles an unlikely friendship, that between the flamboyant, monstrously egocentric Julia and the modest, self-effacing Fay, who is at once fascinated and appalled by Julia's excesses.

With the same compassionate insight and stylistic brilliance that have won her comparisons with Jane Austen and Henry James, the Booker Prize-winning author of Hotel du Lac and Brief Lives explores the self-inflicted paradoxes in the life of Harriet Lytton, a woman whose powers of submissiveness and self-denial are suddenly tested by the dizzying prospect of sexual awakening.

Combining two volumes of Wharton's short stories in a brand new edition, this outstanding selection is the most comprehensive available. Although Edith Wharton is best known for her novels The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, this extensive collection of her short fiction shows her to be a master of all its varieties. Wharton's stories ... owe their enduring power to portray the emotional consequences of life in a rarefied world."-The New York Times

A tale of a woman scholar and the changes--and sameness--she encounters living in London and Paris.

The latest novel by one of the literary scene's most profound observers of women's lives. From the moment Jane first meets Aunt Dolly, with her perfumed mink and bored laughter, she is both fascinated and appalled. But as the exigencies of family life bring Jane and Dolly together, Brookner shows how we sometimes end up loving people we cannot always bring ourselves to like.

The brilliant Anita Brookner, praised by The New York Times as "one of the finest novelists of her generation," now gives us a stunning story of two sisters and the strange patterns of identity and love.        The Sharpe sisters have lived a careful and contemplative existence. Miriam is a translator of French texts and Beatrice a moderately successful pianist. Their lives of quiet sophistication are suddenly interrupted by several complicated men: Max, Beatrices agent; Simon, a handsome and charming married man; and Tom Rivers, a journalist who befriends Miriam. These men create disorder in the Sharpe sisters controlled lives as Miriam, the unromantic stoic of the two, begins an affair and Beatrice's career undergoes an unexpected change.         The exquisite writing, affecting characters, and astonishing psychological perceptions for which Anita Brookner is famous are evident on every page of this beautiful novel by a modern master.

In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in FAMILY AND FRIENDS to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, centering upon the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars. "Brookner works a spell on the reader; being under it is both an education and a delight".--WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD.

Anna Durrant has disappeared from her London flat, and no one has even noticed for four months. In the course of the novel, we come to understand Anna's life and disappearance and the self-destructive rectitude that governs her actions.

Acclaimed novelist Anita Brookner, who is also an authority on French culture, writes about Diderot, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, Huysmans, and the Brothers Goncourt.

Edith Hope, a writer of romantic novels, has jilted her worthy but dull lover at the registry office. She is now staying at a Swiss hotel where she has been banished by her friends to recover from the disgrace. Winner of the Booker Prize, 1984.

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 restore 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.

A literary sensation when it was published by Scribners in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters in the twentieth century. The first American novel to provide a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy, it is the story of the beautiful and beguiling Lily Bart and her ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of a heartless society in which, ultimately, she has no part.

Maud Gonthier yearns for an escape from the cocoon of the bourgeois modesty. The splendid, caddish David Tyler appears to offer one. In this stylish, deeply knowing novel by the author of Hotel du Lac, Maud's seduction creates a chemistry of longing, sensuality, and betrayal--with a surprising climax. 240 pp.

Brookner, a French art scholar as well as a novelist, writes about the work of the French neoclassical painter David (1748-1825), best known for his 1793 work, "The Death of Marat."

Two men who, as children, lost their parents during the Holocaust, end up in England--"latecomers"--where they grow up together, marry, go into business, and grow old. Hartman is pleasure-loving, Fibich more ascetic and introspective, but their long friendship continues in spite of their differences, their sometimes competing goals and fears, and their mixed feelings about their survival in a world of horror.

Growing up in relative seclusion with her widowed mother in London in the 1970s, Emma Roberts's social contacts with others remained limited in scope. As a young woman studying in Paris, her habits have not changed much. Her mother's death and her new friendship with the aggressive and devious Françoise, who embodies everything that Emma isn't, inspire Emma to consider living somewhat more boldly.

Anita Brookner performs a remarkable leap of imaginative sympathy to give us an acute and almost Jamesian vision of a man torn between the comfortable life of the mind and the alluring--but terrifying--world of the senses.

"The spectacle of two people's happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed." Thus claims Fanny, a solitary librarian whose good manners and tart wit conceal a profound and particular heartache. The two happy people are Nick and Alix Fraser, a couple so dazzling that they seem to vindicate Victorian theories of natural selection. In this flawlessly observed novel, Anita Brookner explores the gulf that separates people like Nick and Alix from people like Fanny: the gulf between those assured of love and those condemned to yearn for it.
As a captivated Fanny enters the Fraser's orbit--and that of their highly eligible friend, James--Brookner reveals the terrible price of their affection, as well as the point at which Fanny will be unwilling to pay it. Exquisitely nuanced and as finely balanced and sharply honed as a throwing knife, LOOK AT ME is a classic tale of hope and disappointment, told by a contemporary master.

Gustave Flaubert so scandalized readers with the publication of his first novel, Madame Bovary, he was put on trial for offending the public morality. This now-classic novel established the realistic novel in France and inspired generations of writers in Europe and the United States.

Facing life alone at an advanced age, Julius Herz cannot shake the sense that he should be elsewhere, doing other things. Walking through bustling streets that seem increasingly alien to him, he’s confronted by life’s pressing questions with an urgency he has never known before: what do we owe the people in our lives? How should we fill our days? Feeling fortified despite the growing ache in his heart, Herz finds himself also blessed with a stirring sense of exhilaration. After a lifetime of deferring to others’ stronger wills, he faces a future of possibility, the only constraint the deeply ingrained habits of his mind. Profound and deeply resonant, Making Things Better explores the quandaries of aging, longing, and self-discovery with transfixing precision and spellbinding acuity.

After twenty years of marriage Blanche Vernon is alone; abandoned by her husband Bertie for a childishly demanding computer expert named Mousie. While Blanche finds this turn of events baffling, she feels that Bertie must have left her because of her overly sensible demeanor. Yet many of their mutual friends disagree. In fact, Blanche has come to be regarded as undeniably eccentric--making elliptical remarks that no one knows how to read, and chatting at great length about characters in fiction. She resolutely fills her unwanted hours with activities, maintaining her excellent appearance, drinking increasingly more wine, and, in an attempt to turn her energy to good works, becoming severely enmeshed in the life of a disordered young family.

One of the great heroines of American literature, Isabel Archer, journeys to Europe in order to, as Henry James writes in his 1908 Preface, “affront her destiny.” James began The Portrait of a Lady without a plot or subject, only the slim but provocative notion of a young woman taking control of her fate. The result is a richly imagined study of an American heiress who turns away her suitors in an effort to first establish—and then protect—her independence. But Isabel’s pursuit of spiritual freedom collapses when she meets the captivating Gilbert Osmond. “James’s formidable powers of observation, his stance as a kind of bachelor recorder of human doings in which he is not involved,” writes Hortense Calisher, “make him a first-class documentarian, joining him to that great body of storytellers who amass what formal history cannot.”

Brookner explores the complications that arise when one solitary man comes up against a woman who seems determined to invade his solitude. George Bland is an aging bachelor whose existence has been virtually a mirror image of his name--up until now. For into George's life walks Katy Gibb, young, abrasively self-assured, who incites in George the most alarming feelings.

This brightly polished yet immensely touching comedy presents the romantic quest of Kitty Maule, who, in revenge against the impossibly charming and elusive man who rejects her, resolves to become "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful, " to any number of others.

Steve Hogan, a dissolute drunk, is on a road trip with his wife to pick up their children, but he becomes distracted at a bar along the way. While he is drinking, his wife leaves, taking a bus north. Soon Hogan picks up and befriends a drifter who embodies, for Hogan, a heroic free spirit, a man who has rejected the miserable confines of society. However, it turns out that this man, an escaped convict, has raped Hogan's wife. Now Hogan has to embrace the society he has rejected and face his own culpability in the crime.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Anita Brookner examines the masters of French Romantic painting in the context of nineteenth century poetry, literature, and criticism. Here are Gros as hero and victim, Alfred de Musset as infant de siecle, Delacroix as Romantic classicist, and, later in the century, Zola as an advocate of life for art's sake and Huysmans indulging in the madness of art. Brookner traces the way that French Romanticism followed the political turmoil of the late eighteenth century and the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, and replaced the agnosticism of the Enlightenment and Revolution with a new heroism.

Elizabeth and Betsy had been school friends in 1950s London. Elizabeth, prudent and introspective, values social propriety. Betsy, raised by a spinster aunt, is open, trusting, and desperate for affection. After growing up and going their separate ways, the two women reconnect later in life. Elizabeth has married kind but tedious Digby, while Betsy is still searching for love and belonging. In this deeply perceptive story, Anita Brookner brilliantly charts the resilience of a friendship tested by alienation and by jealousy over a man who seems to offer the promise of escape.

The essays and articles on art and literature assembled here have been written over the last twenty-five years by a writer who has earned recognition as much for her academic achievements as for the accomplishments of her literary career. Anita Brookner begins with the lives and work of the three great nineteenth-century French painters-Géricault, Ingres, and Delacroix-using them as the springboard for an analysis of the complex clashes between the Romantic and Classical movements. She goes on to cast a wide net, taking up subjects ranging from Rousseau's social contract to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, from the Book of Job to the French painter Corot. In this incisive and sometimes controversial collection, Brookner also examines the loves and lives of Rosa Bonheur and Louise Colet, women who arrived at a certain greatness in the literary and art worlds but have been less remembered than they deserved.

Wharton's sharp-eyed, subtle, and penetrating stories portray lives lived under the stultifying weight of upper-class conventions.

Booker-prize winner Anita Brookner (HOTEL DU LAC) mines familiar territory in her 24th novel--old age, loneliness, the subtle bittersweet tragedies of life--but with sublime and heartbreaking effect. As Paul Sturgis nears the age of 80, he ponders on his lack of love, family, and meaningful human connection. Despite a successful career, he has always been too polite, too reserved, and too timid to have engaged fully with his own humanity--he's a man who savors the friendly wave, the trivial niceties of a shop clerk. As he approaches his end, three women represent his last chance for something resembling love: a dead cousin's wife who matches him in isolated pride; a younger woman whose antics gall and thrill him; and an old flame, whose own life has slid into morose desperation. Those familiar with Brookner's work know better than to expect STRANGERS to provide any easy catharsis or manufactured resolution, but despite the novel's apparent calm, its nuanced, poetic, and deeply sympathetic attention to human emotion sets off an indelible series of seismic disturbances of the heart.

A quiet young woman who has lived most of her life under the watchful eyes of her parents, Claire Pitt finds her ordinary life turned upside down when her job at a local bookstore leads to a complicated affair with a mysterious young man.

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