The third novel from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac
The third novel from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac
The third novel from the bestselling author of the Man Booker Prize-winning Hotel du Lac'Once a thing is known it can never be unknown.'By day Frances Hinton works in a medical library, by night she haunts the room of a West London mansion flat. Everything changes, however, when she is adopted by charming Nick and his dazzling wife Alix. They draw her into their tight circle of friends. Suddenly, Frances' life is full and ripe with new engagements. But too late, Frances realises that she may be only a play thing, to be picked up and discarded once used. And that just one act in defiance of Alix's wishes could see her lose everything . . .
“Clever and engrossing.”
How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit. -- Tessa Hadley on 'A Start in Life' Guardian Summer Reads, 2015
Bewitching. The Times
David Lodge, Sunday Times
Flawless. Observer, Books of the Year
Witty, intelligent and tirelessly perceptive. Evening Standard
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and 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. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
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