Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and 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. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
A writer of bewitching readability * The Times * What makes this book gripping . . . is its truthfulness. It is a sort of detective story after all, with Brookner as the sleuth . . . applying her own devastating insight. * Sunday Times * What a humorous and humane as well as accomplished artist she is. * London Review of Books * Classic Brookner * The Times *