{"product_id":"anita-brookner-isbn-9780593321508","title":"Anita Brookner","description":"\u003cb\u003eOne of our most brilliant biographers illuminates the life and work of one of the most fascinating, iconic English novelists of our time\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Hermione Lee is a literary life-writer par excellence.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnita 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 say the name ‘Anita Brookner’ and most people come up with the image of a woman in a long gray cardigan, gazing out the window of a bleak London flat or onto the misty waters of a Swiss lake, wistfully yearning for an absent or unreliable lover. Yet as master biographer Hermione Lee demonstrates in her captivating, immersive biography, Brookner the writer was the inventor of those lonely women, not their alter-ego.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrookner herself was formidable, witty, elegant, precise, and always ruthlessly in charge, and her life was full of contradictions. She was first and foremost an accomplished art historian, and the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge; her debut novel, ironically titled \u003ci\u003eA Start in Life\u003c\/i\u003e, was published at the age of fifty-three. A Booker Prize followed shortly thereafter for her fourth novel, \u003ci\u003eHotel du Lac\u003c\/i\u003e, beating out works by J.G. Ballard and Julian Barnes, and with that, Brookner's reputation as a premiere novelist was cemented.  She left behind twenty-five novels, several volumes of art history, and a wealth of criticism, yet very few personal papers, seemingly determined to preserve her private, enigmatic personal legacy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn Hermione Lee’s hands, Brookner has met her biographical match. This luminous, absorbing portrait seamlessly weaves life and work into a vivid, insightful, and riveting portrait that sheds brilliant light on a novelist—and woman—like no other.HERMIONE LEE was president of Wolfson  College (2008-2017) and is emeritus professor of English literature at  Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf,  Edith Wharton, Tom Stoppard, and Penelope Fitzgerald (winner of the James Tait Black  Memorial Prize and one of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e's 10 Best Books of  2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and  Willa Cather. Lee was awarded the Biographers' Club Prize for  Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. She is a fellow of the  British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a foreign  honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003  she was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British  Empire, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary  scholarship.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48532123549925,"sku":"NP9780593321508","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593321508.jpg?v=1773182734","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/anita-brookner-isbn-9780593321508","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}