Falling Slowly

Sisters Beatrice and Miriam have each other, but they were never close. Beatrice is a pianist, a romantic, while Miriam is disillusioned after a failed marriage. Living together yet failing to confide in one another, each is haunted by the mistakes they have made and the opportunities squandered.

Both know that one day they will be forced to part, that they will each fall alone. So when Beatrice contemplates a future with Max, Miriam wonders whether the time has come sooner than she believed . . .

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

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: 9780241977811
  • Length: 224 pages
  • Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 159g
  • Price: £15.99
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