Strangers

Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night * Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner *No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition and this book is possibly her finest * Observer *The beauty and precision of Brookner’s writing is rightly praised each time she publishes a novel, but what is less often remarked on is her daring … Like Graham Greene, she draws the reader into a world that has a character and signature all of its own … Brookner’s wry, dry lightness of touch creates a bloom on the darkness of her characters’ sufferings … Strangers is a novel of sober brilliance, and the unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist’ * Helen Dunmore, The Times *Consistently absorbing … In the hands of a lesser novelist, her stories of human frailty would be depressing, but she manages to make them sparkle with life - and always with hope * Daily Telegraph *Nothing less than brilliant, often highly amusing and, ultimately life affirming * Sunday Telegraph *A novel of great stylistic beauty and psychological truth … The pitiless depiction of the final stages of life - and the refusal to allow her characters any consolation - makes Strangers as great a reflection on fear and regret as Philip Larkin’s poem Aubade or Beckett’s Endgame * Guardian *A brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep * Spectator *Strangers is, in its own way, definitive … Brookner has given classic expression to what she sees to be a central truth of the human condition, absolute loneliness at the last … Nothing less than a great horror story * Evening Standard *Anita Brookner is a distinguished and defiant writer whose books occupy a unique place in English literature. Her subject is the best one: the definition of human nature. Although her novels often convey the loneliness inherent in the human condition, they do so in such an acute and bold way that loneliness itself is shown to be a state as tempestuous and startling as any other sort of crisis. In Brookner’s hands, in her descriptions so vivid and exact, it can be exhilarating … Her books are unfailingly well written, they give voice and a sense of fierce entitlement to a sort of existence that might otherwise go unrecorded … Brookner’s is a literature that may be harsh but it is absolutely necessary * Independent *

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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