Look At Me

'Once a thing is known it can never be unknown'

By day Frances Hinton works in a medical library, passing the time by studying her colleagues and taking notes for the novel she might write one day. Each night she returns to a vast mansion flat, which has felt bigger and emptier since her mother’s recent death.

Then Frances meets charming Nick and his dazzling wife Alix, and finds herself drawn into their tight circle of friends, her diary suddenly full of engagements and excitement. So taken is Frances with her glittering new life that she doesn’t consider that the couple could discard her just as quickly as they picked her up, or that just one act in defiance of Alix’s wishes might see her lose everything. Until, of course, it is too late…

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.
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Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241977774
  • Length: 192 pages
  • Dimensions: 197mm x 12mm x 128mm
  • Weight: 150g
  • Price: £10.99
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