A Start in Life
  • Published: 1 June 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241981498
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $36.00

A Start in Life

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Nov 2015
Paperback
1 Jun 2017
Paperback
17 Oct 2016
Buy from…
The Nile Mighty Ape BookHub Whitcoulls The Warehouse Paper Plus Fishpond
Find local retailers

The first novel from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time

'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'

Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.

Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .
  • Published: 1 June 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241981498
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $36.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Anita Brookner

Date: 2013-08-06
Anita Brookner, who is an international authority on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1968 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold this position. She is the author of Watteau, The Genius of the Future; Greuze; Jacques-Louis David; and three other novels, A Start in Life, Providence and Look at Me.

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. Leaving Home is her twenty-third novel.

Also by Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac
Brief Lives
A Closed Eye
Fraud
Incidents In The Rue Laugier
Altered States
A Family Romance
See all

Praise for A Start in Life

Excellent

Sunday Times

Enormously sophisticated, knowing, often very funny tragi-comedy

Financial Times

How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit.

Tessa Hadley, Guardian Summer Reads, 2015

A delight, amusing, beautifully written.

The Times

Enormously sophisticated, knowing, often very funny tragi-comedy.

Financial Times

Excellent, brilliantly drawn.

Sunday Times