Anita Brookner Books

Kitty Maule longs to be "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful." She is instead clever, reticent, self-possessed, and striking. For years. Kitty has been tactfully courting her colleague Maurice Bishop, a detached, elegant English professor. Now, running out of patience, Kitty's amorous pursuit takes her from rancorous academic committee rooms and lecture halls to French cathedrals and Parisian rooming houses, from sittings with her dress-making grandmother to seances with a grandmotherly psychic. Touching, funny, and stylistically breathtaking, Providence is a brightly polished gem of romantic comedy.

Anita Brookner is justly famous for her elegant, almost Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in Lewis Percy, she performs a remarkable leap of imaginative empathy in her portrayal of a man torn between the reassuring cloister of the library and the alluring but terrifying world of the senses, a world populated by women who persist in bewildering him.

Brookner again shows herself to be the consummate observer of social nuance in this deeply felt chronicle of an unlikely friendship between the flamboyant, ego-centric Julia and modest, self-effacing Fay, the narrator. Thrust together by their husbands' business partnership and by their sharing of a guilty secret, these two women form an intense and intimate bond that highlights their uneasy compromises with each other -- and with life itself.

A lonely art historian absorbed in her research seizes the opportunity to share in the joys and pleasures of the lives of a glittering couple, only to find her hopes of companionship and happiness shattered.

Modest and reliable throughout his life, George Bland faces retirement with uncertainty, an uncertainnty compounded by the death of his friend, Putnam. However his life will alter dramatically with the arrival of the invasive and mercenary Katy Gibb.

A novel about human relationships, focusing, unusually for Brookner, on two male characters. They met at school and forty years later can no more think of living apart than of divorcing their wives. This book deals with their gradual coming to terms with the emotional gaps in their lives.

Mild and self-effacing, Paul and Henrietta Manning are ill-prepared for the interuptions into their lives of Dolly, widow of Henrietta's brother Hugo. Dolly's ways are idiosyncratic, yet she is an object of fascination and dread to her relatives, especially her niece, Jane.

Born to elegant but frivolous parents, Harriet grows up unguided, shrouded in an innocence that her friendship with Tessa, and later her marriage to Freddie, do nothing to dispel. Freddie is far older and disapproving of Tessa and her husband Jack. And yet all four are bound together.

In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in FAMILY AND FRIENDS to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, centering upon the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars. "Brookner works a spell on the reader; being under it is both an education and a delight".--WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD.