In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a psudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to resore her to her senses.
But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

The winner of the 1984 Booker Prize, this novel tells the story of Edith Hope, 40, unmarried and distraught over a failed love, who is persuaded by friends to go to the quiet, respectable Hotel du Lac in Switzerland. A writer of romantic fiction, Hope becomes enmeshed in the lives of the other guests. Noting that the delivery was perhaps more important than specific events, PW called Brookner ``insidiously observant, so soft of voice the reader must listen closely for the wry wit and sly humor. She is poignantly moving.'' (March) From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Anita Brookner is a novelist whose forte is the meticulous examination of the lives of unremarkable women. She portrays the women with dignity and tolerance. Brookner generates novels of intellectual and emotional compulsion.

Brookner's novels evoke a near contemporary, Barbara Pym, and the tradition of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. But they reflect the realities of a generation later than that of Pym. For Brookner, a simple, pacific femininity no longer provides a respite from a danger that lurks throughout her world. Unhappiness, which Pym's characters bear with resignation, torments Brookner's sensibility. Hotel du Lac (1984) won the Booker Prize and remains Brookner's most acclaimed work. Cunning and formal in tenor, it probes the repressed secrets and fragile psychological condition of a writer, Edith Hope, who is recovering from the external world's threats and bruises and trying to reconcile the life of human passions with the life of the artist. Critics have rated the novel as one of the most important works in the genre of Kunstlerroman for the late modern period.

A professor of art history, Brookner has taught at Cambridge University and the Cortauld Institute where she specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting. In addition to her fiction, Brookner has written scholarly works about Jacques Louis David, Jean Baptiste Greuze, and Jean-Antoine Watteau.

(Bowker Author Biography) Anita Brookner trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She has written a number of books on art history and nineteen novels, including the 1984 Booker Prize winner, Hotel du Lac. She lives in London.

(Publisher Provided) Anita Brookner is the author of twenty beautifully crafted novels, including "Falling Slowly", "Undue Influence", & "Hotel du Lac", which won the Booker Prize. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University. She lives in London.

(Publisher Provided) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.