Anita Brookner

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory.' Elizabeth and Betsy are old school friends. Born in 1948 and unready for the sixties, they had high hopes of the lives they would lead, even though their circumstances were so different. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth, married to the safe, older Digby is relieving the boredom of a cosy but childless marriage with an affair. Betsy seems to have found real romance in Paris. Are their lives taking off, or are they just making more of the wrong choices without even realising it?

"At seventy-three, Herz is facing an increasingly bewildering world. He cannot see his place in it or even work out what to do with his final years. Questions and misunderstandings haunt Herz like old ghosts. Should he travel, sell his flat, or propose marriage to a friend he has not seen in tirthy years? The letters he writes and does not send and the passers-by he encounters remind him how out of touch he is, how detached from the modern world. Yet Herz believes that he must do something, only he doesn't know what this next big thing in life should be ... In her most beguiling novel yet, Anita Brookner's darkly comic, beautifully drawn and wonderfully sympathetic portrait of Herz reveals all the anxieties and consolations of old age.

"Making Things Better captures the quandaries of aging: the misunderstanding of an increasingly modern, alien world, awkward conversations with passersby; even more awkward encounters with longtime friends and acquaintances; the anxieties posed by age and uncertainty - and the bizarre, magnificent self-knowledge that perhaps only age, reflection, and experience can bring."--BOOK JACKET.

Zoe and her mother have led a quiet life together in their London flat, a life that everyone thought would continue in the same manner forever. But when her mother suddenly finds love again and moves with her new husband to Nice, Zoe embraces her newfound freedom and seems to thrive in her independent life. Her liberation is cut short when her stepfather unexpectedly dies and leaves behind mysteries and less wealth than he appeared to have. Zoe's mother falls strangely ill, and while Zoe tries to come to terms with an uncertain future, she begins to follow the movements of a reclusive and alluring man. "Brookner works a spell on the reader; being under it is both an education and a delight," said The Washington Post Book World of Anita Brookner, and she stays true to form in The Bay of Angels, another stunning novel by a master.From the Hardcover edition.

"Anita Brookner traces how 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 the Revolution with a new heroism. Examining the works of Delacroix, Ingres and Gros, the Brothers Goncourt, Baudelaire, Zola, Alfred de Musset and Huysmans, she argues that the Romantics in France made the heroism of modern life their creed and transferred their idealism to the domain of art, either as practitioners or as critics." "At the same time, Anita Brookner takes the reader on a tour of these artists and writers, bringing vividly to life unfamiliar works, and casting a brillant new light on more familiar ones."--BOOK JACKET.

The Sharpe sisters' quiet lives are disrupted when they become involved with several complicated men.

Modest, reliable, decorous George Bland faces retirement, surprised to find himself suddenly alone and uncertain. His solitude is brusquely overturned when the mercurial and invasive Katy Gibb appears. By turn sulky girl and sultry woman, Katy embodies an attitude of entitlement quite foreign to Bland, yet she also appears to offer a last chance for adventure, for abandoning the weight of a lifetime of discretion and responsibility. In the contest of wills that follows, Bland discovers his true nature, his capacity for compromise and self-deception. The result is a novel rich in understanding of human complexity and of the desire to take charge of one's own destiny.

Anita Brookner tells of Maud Gonthier, a demure and serious young woman from Dijon, who is introduced to desire by the fascinating, rich David Tyler. They meet one summer at her aunt's comfortable country home; the innocent Maud falls instantly and passionately in love. She follows Tyler to Paris, and when he abruptly disappears, Maud is left with his friend Edward to pick up the pieces of her life.

When Anna Durant disappears, it is months before anyone notices. To understand the connections of the characters to Anna's disturbing disappearance, they must first confront their own fraudulent behavior.

Anita Brookner has been called "one of the finest novelists of her generation" by The New York Times and "a latter-day Jane Austen" by Publishers Weekly. Now, in Dolly, Brookner continues to explore in her masterful way the changing truths of identity and relationships in the lives of women, with this brilliant portrait of a family. Mild and self-effacing, Jane Manning is ill prepared for the eruption into her life of her glamorous aunt, Dolly. Married to Jane's uncle, Dolly swirls into the Manning home, and, with her perfumed mink and bored laugh, makes it clear that her ways are not their ways, are not in fact anybody else's ways. Dolly becomes an object of both fascination and dread, and as Jane studies her aunt, she realizes that she and Dolly have absolutely nothing in common - nothing, except the fact that they are members of the same family. Jane begins to suspect that Dolly is not the woman she appears to be, that her elegant life is not as charming as she wants people to think. Then Dolly's husband dies, and Jane finds that she and her aunt are fated to be yoked together in uneasy social and financial harness. Brilliantly written, acutely observed, Dolly is Anita Brookner at her best, an elegant and illuminating exploration of how realities change, how power and perceptions alter over the course of a family's life.

Chronicles the relationship between two women--Julia, the glamorous, manipulative ex-cabaret star, and the timid, modest Faye--whose husbands are business associates, in a study of the fragility and resilience of friendship.

Destined to be a haunter of libraries, Lewis's cautious progress through life reveals to him only his own shortcomings. Estranged from his wife and daughter, he searches for an alternative. This novel presents the life and aspirations of one man who remains out of step with his times.

Cette oeuvre s'inscrit dans la tradition du roman psychologique à l'anglaise. L'auteure y poursuit sa réflexion sur la tension entre le "désir infini" et sa "réalisation limitée", comme le signale C. Jordis. Un roman qui n'a pas la profondeur de ##Regardez-moi## mais qui constitue cependant une réussite.

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 spinsterhood is renewed ... Winner of the Booker Prize in 1984, 'Hotel du Lac' was described by The Times as 'A smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably clever'.

Since childhood Ruth Weiss has been escaping from life into books, and from the hothouse attentions of her tyrannical and eccentric parents into the gentler warmth of lovers and friends. Now Dr. Weiss, at forty, a quiet scholar devoted to the study of Balzac, is convinced that her life has been ruined by literature, and that once again she must make a new start in life.

Had he sacrificed his happiness for her? Brodie had always counted on Drew to look after her, provide for her and keep her safe. She hated to think that her dependence on Drew had kept him from finding happiness--especially now. Brodie was facing heartache, and she needed Drew more than ever. Still, she couldn't help but wonder about the love Drew had lost so many years ago. She never dreamed that Drew's decision to remain single might have had anything to do with her--until Drew proposed marriage to pull Brodie out of yet another scrape.