Providence

byAnita Brookner

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Kitty Maule wants to be 'totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful.'

Instead, she is clever, hesitant and too patient for her own good. For years, she has been in love with her colleague Maurice Bishop, a charming English lecturer who seems not to notice her feelings. But when there comes a chance to accompany Maurice to France on a study of French cathedrals, Kitty sees an opporunity to be the woman she has always wanted to be as well as at last make the man she wants fall in love with her. But why is that the closer she gets to Maurice, the more elusive he seems to become?

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

About 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.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241977767
  • Length: 192 pages
  • Dimensions: 197mm x 12mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 141g
  • Price: £9.99
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