{"product_id":"9781784744687","title":"Anita Brookner : Art and Life","description":"\u003cp\u003e Author(s): Lee, Hermione \u003cbr\u003e Binding: Hardback, \u003cbr\u003e Date of Publication: 10\/09\/2026,\u003cbr\u003e Pagination: 544 pages,\u003cbr\u003e ISBN13\\EAN\\SKU: 9781784744687,\u003cbr\u003e Description: \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner’s marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBorn in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Griffin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57543064060277,"sku":"9781784744687","price":28.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0379\/1365\/7388\/files\/9781784744687.jpg?v=1788383715","url":"https:\/\/www.griffinbooksonline.co.uk\/products\/9781784744687","provider":"Griffin Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}