{"product_id":"9781784744687-anita-brookner","title":"Anita Brookner","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eArt and Life\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\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\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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 \u003ci\u003eA Start in Life\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for \u003ci\u003eHotel du Lac\u003c\/i\u003e; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\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\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56849145528694,"sku":"9781784744687","price":22.87,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_39155221_96bfc3e0-23b3-41d6-9a0f-aeca2e290095.jpg?v=1766440456","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9781784744687-anita-brookner","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}