Look At Me

'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 . . .

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: 9780241977774
  • Length: 192 pages
  • Dimensions: 197mm x 15mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 140g
  • Price: £9.99
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