{"product_id":"9781784744687","title":"Anita Brookner : Art and Life - Hermione Lee","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePre-order.\u003c\/strong\u003e Published 10 September 2026 — we'll send your copy on publication day. Order now and we'll put one aside for you. Free UK delivery on orders over £20, or collect from the shop in Oxford's Covered Market.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003chr\u003e\nThe 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. Born 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. For 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 A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties. In 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.","brand":"Hermione Lee","offers":[{"title":"544 pages \/ 10\/09\/2026 \/ History of art \/ art \u0026 design styles","offer_id":57415929233783,"sku":"9781784744687","price":28.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0682\/9454\/1624\/files\/9781784744687.jpg?v=1787909769","url":"https:\/\/gulpfictionbooks.com\/products\/9781784744687","provider":"Gulp Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}