A Start in Life
From the Booker Prize-Winning Author of Hotel Du Lac
1st Edition
Published on 5. November 2015
176 pages
978-0-241-97650-0 (ISBN)
Description
'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'
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.
Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .
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.
Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .
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
File size
1,12 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-241-97650-0 (9780241976500)
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
Anita Brookner
A Start in Life
Book
06/1991
Penguin Books Ltd
€28.65
Article exhausted; check different version
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.
