New Releases by Anita Brookner

"A sus cuarenta años, la doctora Weiss comprendió que la literatura le había destrozado la vida." Ruth Weiss es una profesora universitaria inteligente y solitaria que se ha especializado en los personajes femeninos de Balzac, en los que intenta ver reflejos de su propia vida. Criada en Londres en el seno de una familia un tanto excéntrica -hija única de una actriz de teatro un poco hipocondríaca y un bibliófilo y librero de viejo con muy poco talento para el comercio-, su precoz afición a la literatura la llevó a pensar que en las grandes novelas se podía encontrar la verdadera medida del mundo. Pero ahora, cuando vuelve la mirada hacia el pasado, hacia su infancia en Londres y sus años universitarios en París, piensa que, en realidad, quizá estaba equivocada. La primera novela de Anita Brookner -una de las grandes escritoras británicas de finales del siglo xx- es un relato lúcido, irónico y tierno sobre la contradicción entre las aspiraciones de una joven embelesada por la literatura y una vida que tiende a ser más prosaica de lo que imaginamos.

Im Alter von vierzig Jahren wurde Dr. Weiss klar, dass die Literatur ihr Leben ruiniert hatte. Das meisterhafte Debüt der Booker-Preisträgerin erstmals auf Deutsch Die »letzte große Autorin des 20. Jahrhunderts«. Daily Telegraph Von klein auf flüchtet sich Ruth Weiss in die Welt der Bücher, wo sie Antworten auf ihre Fragen sucht. Ihre nicht erwachsen werden wollenden Eltern sind ihr dabei keine Hilfe. Mutter Helen, eine ehemals gefeierte Schauspielerin, verbringt ihre Tage rauchend und immer einen Drink in der Hand im Bett. Vater George, einst Buchhändler und Helens größter Verehrer, sehnt sich nach einer Frau, die ihm ein gemütliches Heim schafft. Und die verwitwete Haushälterin Mrs. Cutler ist mehr damit beschäftigt, Helen bei Drinks und Zigaretten Gesellschaft zu leisten, als sich um Ruth oder den Haushalt zu kümmern. Ein Studienjahr in Paris soll die große Wendung in Ruths Leben bringen. Dort erfährt die junge Frau zum ersten Mal, was Freiheit bedeutet. Wird sie hier endlich ihrer Einsamkeit entkommen? Schon Anita Brookners Debüt ist ein vollendetes Stück Literatur. Tessa Hadley zählte Ein Start ins Leben im Guardian zu einem ihrer besten Romane und nannte ihn »schwarzhumorig, düster, und sehr, sehr witzig.« »Ein großer, intensiver Roman, der sehr an den brillanten Erzähler Balzac erinnert.« WDR 4, Elke Heidenreich

An “almost flawless novel” (People) about a quiet scholar who is convinced that her life has been ruined by literature and that she must make a new start in life. Since childhood, Ruth Weiss had been escaping from life into books, and from the attentions of her eccentric parents into the gentler warmth and company of friends and lovers. Now at forty years old, an academic devoted to the study of Balzac, she believes that literature has ruined her life and that she must once again, make a fresh start. “Lively, filled with gentle humor” (Miami Herald) this is an elegant and wry novel that will stay with you long after the final page is turned.

In una calda, umida e sensuale estate alla fine degli anni Cinquanta, Maud Gonthier, timida diciottenne dalla bellezza austera, viso dorato, capelli biondi e occhi dalle lunghe ciglia privi di trucco, arriva nella casa di campagna della zia per trascorrere le vacanze estive. Lì incontra le due figure maschili che segneranno per sempre la sua vita: David Tyler, un inglese di incredibile bellezza, figlio di un ricco magnate dell’industria, sfrontato come può esserlo un giovane uomo che vanta già innumerevoli conquiste sul suo carnet, e l’amico del cuore di quest’ultimo dai tempi di Cambridge, Edward Harrison, un giovanotto dall’aria apparentemente romantica, in realtà dalle emozioni sfuggenti, sempre tese a un punto lontano, nel passato o nell’affascinante futuro. Il triangolo erotico, e latentemente omoerotico, lascia il segno nell’indifesa Maud che si innamora perdutamente del seducente Tyler. La relazione tra i tre continua a Parigi nell’appartamento di Rue Laugier. Persa nel delirio d’amore, Maud vede Tyler come una divinità crudele che si prende sfacciatamente gioco dei suoi sentimenti e di quelli di Edward. Con la sua sorprendente e delicata scrittura, Anita Brookner sonda la vita e i pensieri più riposti di Maud e Edward per svelarci come i due si siano lasciati ingannare dal ragazzo bello e ricco che, come tutti quelli della sua casta, è gentile e spietato insieme e ostenta una disinvoltura che sconfina spesso nell’indifferenza più palese. Come le altre eroine della Brookner, Maud ha una madre autoritaria con cui ha un legame così contorto che le sue relazioni con gli uomini ne sono irrimediabilmente segnate. Edward, infiammato da Maud per via di Tyler, assume, invece, il ruolo di voyeurista, effeminato, bambinesco, servile e protettivo. Con l’uscita di scena di Tyler, che un giorno ritorna nel mondo dorato da cui è venuto, alla ricerca forse di nuove emozioni e di nuove vittime, Maud e Edward si ritrovano a dover rifare i conti con la propria vita e a stringere un legame in cui l’amore e persino la fiducia non contano più nulla. Tra le opere che esprimono meglio lo stile e il mondo propri di Anita Brookner, Rue Laugier è un romanzo che il lettore sfoglia in modo compulsivo, abbagliato da una lettura in cui ogni frase colpisce al cuore. «Anita Brookner regala una romanzo spiazzante sui desideri infranti e sulle tragiche conseguenze della passione servendosi di una scrittura perfetta, densa di drammatica verità». Carlotta Vissani, Mucchio «Dall’autrice di Guardatemi, «una tesa esplorazione della passione e delle sue crudeli conseguenze». Helen Dunmore, The Observer «Un romanzo che si dipana come un brutto sogno dal quale i protagonisti non si risvegliano. Maud fugge dal decoro borghese della madre vedova innamorandosi di Tyler, ricco e affascinante ospite inglese che la seduce per poi abbandonarla. Edward, trasognato amico di università di Tyler, si offre di sposarla...» Boston Review

In A Closed Eye, Anita Brookner explores, with compassionate insight and stylistic brilliance, 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. In Harriers gallant struggle with the single great temptation that comes her way, Brookner creates a hauntingly flawed heroine and a study in the evasions and disappointments that make up all our lives.

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, Beatrice's 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.

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 Booker Prize winning author of Hotel du Lac, Maud's seduction creates a chemistry of longing, sensuality, and betrayal--with a surprising climax.

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, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars. Presiding over the Dorn household is the formidable Sofka, an elegant and circumspect widow who watches as her four children find their way into adulthood. Frederick, the sybaritic eldest son, escapes to the comforts of the Riviera while stern, dutiful Alfred runs the family business and burns with unrealized longings; Betty—pleasure-loving, vain, and selfish—makes her ambitious way from Paris to Hollywood, leaving her dreamy, passive sister Mimi to languish at home. A brilliant social novel of lost innocence and the complex nature of family bonds, Family and Friends meticulously portrays the emotional cost of everyday life.

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.

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.

A novel about the 50-year friendship of two dissimilar German refugees brought over to England as children from Nazi Germany. Their friendship becomes a funny yet touching model for the ways in which human beings come to terms with the tragedy of living.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • When romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review 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. 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?"

Anita Brookner is justly famous for her elegant, almost Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in Lewis Percy, she performs a remarkable leap of imaginative empathy in her portrayal of a man torn between the reassuring cloister of the library and the alluring but terrifying world of the senses, a world populated by women who persist in bewildering him.

The extraordinary Anita Brookner gives us a brilliant novel about age and awakening. In Visitors, Brookner explores what happens when a woman's quiet resignation to fate is challenged by the arrogance of youth. Dorothea May is most at ease in the company of strangers -- so when she is prevailed upon to take in a young man in town for a family wedding, her carefully constructed, solitary world is thrown into disarray. As the wedding approaches, old family secrets surface and conflicts erupt between the generations. Dorothea's fragile façade of peaceful acceptance is pierced, forcing her to face in a new way both her past and her future. Exquisite writing, richly drawn characters, and penetrating perceptions about people are featured in another superb novel from this acclaimed and award-winning writer.

In Undue Influence, acclaimed novelist Anita Brookner proves once again that even in the most closely circumscribed of lives, hearts can venture into unknown-and potentially explosive-territory. Claire Pitt is nothing if not a practical young woman, living a life in contemporary London that is to all appearances placid, orderly and consciously lacking in surprise. And yet Claire's tangled interior life gives the lie to that illusion. She is prone to vivid speculation about the lives of others, and to fantasies about her own fate that lead her into a courtship so strange that even she wonders at its power to compel her. Martin Gibson and his chronically ill wife Cynthia come to depend on Claire to an extent that is nothing short of baffling, and yet Claire becomes ever bolder in her pursuit of their acquaintance-and, ultimately, of Martin's elusive affections. The result, a potent tale of urban loneliness and the chance intersections that assuage it, constitutes one of Brookner's finest and most psychologically acute achievements.

In this masterly new novel, the Booker Prize–winning author of Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better gives us an exquisite story about the changes in relationships over time, and how our life choices can both reflect the past and direct the future. Hailed as “one of the finest novelists of her generation” (The New York Times), Anita Brookner here weaves an impeccably crafted tale of two women, friends from youth, and the decisions and men that define their destinies. Elizabeth and Betsy knew each other as schoolchildren. When they meet again later in life, one is safely married, the other most unsafely partnered. Together, they discover that despite their very disparate lives, they still have in common the capacity for making dangerous choices. Ultimately, their inclination to implement these decisions reveals the fate that was spelled out in their characters from the start.

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.

This is a collection of essays on art and literature.

Ce sont quatre enfants, au commencement des années vingt : Frederick, l'aîné, qui apparaîtra longtemps comme un "conquérant désinvolte " ; Alfred, qui rêve d'interminables études en attendant le jour où il lui faudra reprendre l'usine familiale ; Mireille, qui retarde le moment d'avouer son amour à Franck ; Betty, qui fuira la bonne société britannique en retrouvant ce dernier à Paris. Quatre enfants dont les talents ont été insensiblement déplacés de leur centre de gravité, discrètement muselés par les attentions et les distractions d'une mère : Sofka. Ce sont des personnages inachevés, mais aimables, qu'Anita Brookner place autour de Sofka, figure maternelle rigide, hiératique ; elle nous raconte, dissimulée par le respect des convenances bourgeoises, leur errance.

Séparée de son mari, qui lui a préféré une femme plus jeune, Blanche Vernon s'est repliée dans le cercle de ses habitudes. Héroïne solitaire, rêveuse et secrètement excentrique, Blanche a pourtant un don aigu de l'autodérision, une aptitude à observer les êtres. La rencontre de Mrs Beamish, jeune femme aux cent couleurs, et de sa fille, qui utilise le silence pour tenir le monde à distance, la mène peu à peu hors des sentiers bien fréquentés, loin des cottages de la petite morale grise ; là, sans doute, où seule Anita Brookner pouvait conduire le lecteur.

Modest and reliable George Bland faces retirement, surprised to find himself suddenly alone and uncertain. But his solitude is brusquely overturned when the invasive and mercurial Katy Gibb appears. Katy, by turns sulky girl and sultry woman, offers George a last chance for a adventure, an abandonment of discretion and responsibility. In the contest of wills that follows, George discovers his true nature, his enormous 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.

The latest novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of Hotel du Lac chronicles an unlikely friendship between two very different women thrust together by their husbands' business partnership--and by a guilty secret. "Anita Brookner works a spell on the reader; being under it is both an education and a delight".--The Washington Post Book World.