A Start in Life
Published on 2. June 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
176 pages
978-0-241-97775-0 (ISBN)
Description
'Excellent' Sunday Times
'Enormously sophisticated' Financial Times
'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'
Dr Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.
As she revisits her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs of years gone by, she begins to wonder whether perhaps there might still be a chance for a new start in life . . .
'A delight ... Amusing and beautifully written' The Times
'The unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist' Helen Dunmore, The Times, praise for Anita Brookner
'Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night' Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner
'Enormously sophisticated' Financial Times
'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'
Dr Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.
As she revisits her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs of years gone by, she begins to wonder whether perhaps there might still be a chance for a new start in life . . .
'A delight ... Amusing and beautifully written' The Times
'The unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist' Helen Dunmore, The Times, praise for Anita Brookner
'Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night' Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner
Reviews / Votes
Excellent * Sunday Times * Enormously sophisticated, knowing, often very funny tragi-comedy * Financial Times * How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit. -- Tessa Hadley * Guardian Summer Reads, 2015 * A delight, amusing, beautifully written. * The Times * Enormously sophisticated, knowing, often very funny tragi-comedy. * Financial Times * Excellent, brilliantly drawn. * Sunday Times *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 201 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
130 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-97775-0 (9780241977750)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2015
1st Edition
Penguin Books Ltd
€8.99
Available for download
Person
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she 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. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.