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  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241979426
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $25.00

A Family Romance



Novel from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac

Paul and Henrietta Manning and their solitary, academic daughter Jane have nothing in common with Dolly, widow of Henrietta's brother. Corseted and painted, Dolly is a frivolous, superficial woman, who has little time for those without that inestimable quality - charm.

Jane, in particular, falls into this category, especially after the death of her parents. But Jane has money - and a conscience - and these bind her to Dolly. Through disagreements, disappointments and disapprovals, Jane and Dolly are enmeshed in an uneasy alliance in which history and family create closer ties than friendship ever could.

  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241979426
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $25.00

About the author

Anita Brookner

Date: 2013-08-06
Anita Brookner, who is an international authority on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1968 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold this position. She is the author of Watteau, The Genius of the Future; Greuze; Jacques-Louis David; and three other novels, A Start in Life, Providence and Look at Me.

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. Leaving Home is her twenty-third novel.

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Praise for A Family Romance

The novel is nearly as perfect an instance of its genre as it is reasonable to ask.

Frank Kermode, Spectator

This is vintage Brookner: all exquisite understatement, acute observation and razor-sharp dissection of motive.

Time Out

This small history unfolds slowly, with delicious wit or bitter pathos, and finally with a marvellous, lingering human resonance.

Sunday Express

Compelling . . . some classic Brookner quality stays in the mind; questions hover, polite but uncomfortable, long after the final page.

Times Literary Supplement