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 *Nothing less than brilliant, often highly amusing and, ultimately life affirming * Sunday Telegraph *

Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 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. Strangers is her twenty-fourth novel.

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