{"product_id":"anita-brookner-by-hermione-lee-9781784744687","title":"Anita Brookner","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual... piercingly intelligent... Lee's biography... has joie de vivre, high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind'\u003c\/em\u003e \u003cspan\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner's marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBorn in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFor many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled \u003cem\u003eA Start in Life\u003c\/em\u003e. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for \u003cem\u003eHotel du Lac\u003c\/em\u003e; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House NZ","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48340120436972,"sku":"9781784744687","price":65.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781784744687-anita-brookner-1.jpg?v=1789011893","url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/products\/anita-brookner-by-hermione-lee-9781784744687","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}