Editions

A Start in Life

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241977750

  • Length: 176  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 11mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 127g

  • RRP: £8.99

A Start in Life

'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 . . .

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241977750

  • Length: 176  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 11mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 127g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • 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

More from this Author

View all View all
View all View all

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 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.

Anita Brookner

Read more

/content/dam/prh/articles/adults/2020/july/Main-WorstHolidays.jpg

Recommendations

Murder and malaise: the most doomed holidays in literature

If you're disappointed not to be going away this summer, console yourself with these disastrous trips from fiction. They'll make a fortnight on the sofa all the more enticing.

Our Use of Cookies

We use cookies on this site to enable certain parts of the site to function and to collect information about your use of the site so that we can improve our visitors’ experience. For more on our cookies and changing your settings click here

Our Use of Cookies

We use cookies on this site to enable certain parts of the site to function and to collect information about your use of the site so that we can improve our visitors’ experience.

For more on our cookies and changing your settings click here

Strictly Necessary

Strictly Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions. See More.

Analytics

Analytics cookies help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. These cookies may be set by us or by third-party providers whose services we have added to our pages. See More.

Preferences & Features

Preference and Feature cookies allow our website to remember choices you make, such as your language preferences and any customisations you make to pages on our website during your visit. See More.

Targeting / Advertising

Targeting cookies are used to make advertising messages more relevant to you and your interests. They perform functions like preventing the same content from reappearing, ensuring ads are displayed and, in some cases, selecting content based on your interests. See More.