{
  "type": "edition",
  "site": {
    "name": "The Book Quiver",
    "language": "en-US",
    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com"
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  "formats": "Every page has two versions with the same data: JSON (the page address + .json) and markdown (the page address + .md). Append .json or .md to any `url` in this document.",
  "title": "Anita Brookner",
  "subtitle": null,
  "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee/anita-brookner/9781784744687",
  "publisher": "Chatto & Windus",
  "translators": [],
  "medium": "paper",
  "duration_seconds": null,
  "narrators": [],
  "isbn": "978-17-8474-468-7",
  "pages": 544,
  "published": "2026-09-10",
  "language": "en_GB",
  "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/chatto-windus/hermione-lee/anita-brookner_978-17-8474-468-7-c234da09.webp?v=2026-09-26%2003%3A09%3A02",
  "json": "https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee/anita-brookner/9781784744687.json",
  "markdown": "https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee/anita-brookner/9781784744687.md",
  "binding": "Hardcover",
  "description": "It would be hard to think of a better biographer for this uniquely contradictory intellectual…. piercingly intelligent… Lee’s biography … has joie de vivre , high humour and energetic compassion for the multiplying complexities of the human mind' The Observer ' A gripping and illuminating portrait of a life dedicated to its art' Financial Times '[A] thoroughly absorbing and beguiling biography' Spectator 'One emerges from Lee’s biography deeply moved' Sunday Times The groundbreaking biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers. Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Anita Brookner’s marvellous work in all its stylishness and daring. Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her parents were anxious and unhappy. Until she was well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival. For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism in art, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life . In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac ; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties. In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.",
  "book": {
    "title": "Anita Brookner",
    "slug": "anita-brookner",
    "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee/anita-brookner"
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  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Hermione Lee",
      "slug": "hermione-lee",
      "url": "https://www.bookquiver.com/hermione-lee"
    }
  ]
}