Anita Brookner

visitors

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Kate-Atkinson

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Hotel du Lac

A Start in Life

Brief Lives

A Closed Eye

Fraud

A Family Romance

A Private View

Incidents in the Rue Laugier

Altered States

Lewis Percy

Providence

Look At Me

Family And Friends

Falling Slowly

Undue Influence

The Bay Of Angels

The Next Big Thing

Strangers

Latecomers

Leaving Home

Visitors

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

Brookner's novels are seductively deceptive, swirling underneath their elegance and order are huge, if guarded, reservoirs of turbulence.

One of the best things Brookner has done . . . Brookner, skilful and compassionate as ever, reveals her old-fashioned moral code to be both honourable and horrific.

Like Jane Austen, this novelist works on a little square of ivory rather than a broad canvas . . . Like Virginia Woolf, her aim is not to draw characters in the round, but to reveal psychological reality in the deep.

Dorothea May's tranquility is shattered by Kitty Levinson's announcement of her granddaughter's forthcoming marriage. As the wedding approaches, the scene is set for a highly charged conflict of generations, in which the claims of the young are in stark and selfish contrast to the disabling propriety of the old. VISITORS is a vivid exploration of familial responsibilities and the expectations that perpetually threaten to overwhelm them.

'Fiction taught her all she knew of life, taught her to interpret the lives of others.' 
 
Dorothea May has had a reclusive life, particularly since the death of her husband Henry some fifteen years ago. Genteel, faint-hearted and solitary, her closest relatives are Henry's cousin, the imperious Kitty, and her husband Austin. 
 
When Kitty's granddaughter comes to London to marry, Dorothea is bullied into providing a room for Steve, the best man, thus plunging her into a world of youth that she finds both puzzling and transforming.

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.

Visitors

Format:

Buy the book from:

About Anita Brookner

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter