Anita Brookner: Art and Life

One of our most brilliant biographers illuminates the life and work of an incomparable, extraordinary and fascinating novelist.

“Hermione Lee is a literary life-writer par excellence.” —The Atlantic


Anita Brookner is famous for her quiet, incisive studies of solitary and emotionally restrained characters—often middle-class women—navigating loneliness, disappointment, and small eruptions of desire beneath a façade of reserve. She is so closely associated with these protagonists, in fact, that ...