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Brief Lives
  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241979396
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $39.99
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Brief Lives

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

Fay Langdon has relinquished her singing career to marry Owen, a highly successful solicitor. At one of their dinner parties Fay meets the glamorous, self-obsessed Julia and is destined to join the handful of acolytes who provide Julia with ammunition for her merciless scorn and disapprobation.

As the years pass and Fay and Julia's lives grow empty of purpose, they are drawn together by their fear of age and isolation. Yet a mutual mistrust continues to exist between them until Fay is driven to one last heroic act.
  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241979396
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $39.99
Categories:

About the author

Anita Brookner

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.
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Also by Anita Brookner

A Closed Eye
Fraud
Incidents in the Rue Laugier
Altered States
A Family Romance
A Private View
Lewis Percy
See all

Praise for Brief Lives

One of Brookner's best novels

Penelope Lively, The Observer

Utterly absorbing . . . so great is Brookner's skill as a writer that you will find it difficult not to devour this brilliant novel at one long sitting.

Daily Mail

A subtle and thorough exploration of the relationship between nostalgia and old age . . . Brooker [is] one of the bravest novelists around.

Jonathan Coe, Guardian

Compression, economy and the ability to conjure up an entire personality with a few adroitly chosen words. Brief Lives is a perfect demonstration of these gifts.

Penelope Lively, Evening Standard