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  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241979402
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $44.99
Categories:

A Closed Eye



Novel from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac

Naive and undemanding, Harriet Lytton expects very little of life and that is what she recieves. Married to a respectable man old enough to be her father, Harriet's only taste of passion comes when she meets Jack Peckham, the unruly, attractive husband of her friend Tessa.

Tessa and Harriet have for many years been bound together by their childhood friendship and the imposed alliance of their two daughters, Imogen and Lizzie. But events conspire to shatter the gentle rhythm of Harriet's life. Tragically restrained by her own cautious choices, she faces the cruellest losses of all: those of hope and desire.

  • Published: 1 December 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241979402
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $44.99
Categories:

About the author

Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she 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. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.

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Praise for A Closed Eye

A bravura performance

Observer

Anita Brookner's eleventh novel is one of her best . . . She is a great writer. And her final pages, which unfold into a surprising, radiant kindness, will move you to tears.

Mail on Sunday

The portrait of Harriet's sad, kind marriage is superb; and Harriet herself is the best Brookner heroine since Edith of Hotel du Lac.

New Statesman

Loneliness can hardly have been better portrayed . . . This is Anita Brookner at her most sombre: yet not gloomy or depressing - the writing is too good.

Financial Times