Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988.
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1984. Exiled to Switzerland by her embarrassed friends, Edith Hope longs to end her cumbersome spinsterhood and engage in genteel romance, possibly with the sardonic Mr Neville. Its tone is more ambiguous than Brookner's earlier novels, and its themes - vain longing for a loving union between two people, an aching for morality and a sense of purpose - are treated with sympathy and intelligence. (Kirkus UK)