Brief Lives

Description

Novel from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac Fay Langdon has relinquished her singing career to marry Owen, a highly successful solicitor. At one of their dinner parties Fay meets the glamorous, self-obsessed Julia and is destined to join the handful of acolytes who provide Julia with ammunition for her merciless scorn and disapprobation. As the years pass and Fay and Julia's lives grow empty of purpose, they are drawn together by their fear of age and isolation. Yet a mutual mistrust continues to exist between them until Fay is driven to one last heroic act.

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.

One of Brookner's best novels * Penelope Lively, The Observer * Utterly absorbing . . . so great is Brookner's skill as a writer that you will find it difficult not to devour this brilliant novel at one long sitting. * Daily Mail * A subtle and thorough exploration of the relationship between nostalgia and old age . . . Brooker [is] one of the bravest novelists around. * Jonathan Coe, Guardian * Compression, economy and the ability to conjure up an entire personality with a few adroitly chosen words. Brief Lives is a perfect demonstration of these gifts. * Penelope Lively, Evening Standard *