Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2006
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture out into the wider world ..... Once settled in a small Paris hotel, Emma befriends Françoise Desnoyers, a vibrant young woman who is as confident as Emma is tentative, as provocative as Emma is reserved, and as worldly as Emma is naïve.
For Emma, the glimpse into Françoise's turbulent life affords her a newfound and welcome respect for her own. But as she begins to date and to feel at home in her new city, Emma must make a decision: settle for a life of comfortable relationships and familiar routines, or hold out for "that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned."
'Starred Review. This isn't an Austen novel, and even an instant of unalloyed pleasure would seem glib after several pages of Emma's serene circumspection...Emma is among the most delicately rendered heroines in recent fiction.' - PW.
'The beautifully ordered prose of Brookner's 23rd novel is the verbal equivalent of the empty gardens Emma inhabits.' - Kirkus.
'Brookner infuses every exchange with profound philosophical concerns....it takes an astute and rarefied novelist to write large the story of a staid life.' - Booklist.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Italiaander
Novelist and art historian, Dr Anita Brookner, was born in London on 16 July 1928. She studied at King's College, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Brookner spent three years studying in Paris as a postgraduate, and went on to lecture in art at Reading University and the Courtauld Institute, where she specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. She became the first woman to be named as Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University in 1967.
Her first novel, A Start in Life, was published in 1981. Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was adapted for television in 1986. The Bay of Angels (2001), concerns a single woman coming to terms with a new sense of freedom when her widowed mother re-marries and moves abroad. Her 24th and ...
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