Hotel du Lac

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.Miss Brookner's most absorbing novel . . . graceful and attractiveHer technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding

Hotel du Lac is written with a beautiful grave formality, and it catches at the heart

The last great novelist of the 20th centuryA classic . . . a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from nowA smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably cleverShe is one of the great writers of contemporary fictionA classic . . . a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from nowA smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably cleverHotel du Lac is written with a beautiful grave formality, and it catches at the heartShe is one of the great writers of contemporary fiction

Winner of the Booker Prize

'The Hotel du Lac was a dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, the respected patrons of an earlier era'

Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac timidly walks Edith Hope, romantic novelist and holder of modest dreams. Edith has been exiled from home after embarrassing herself and her friends. She has refused to sacrifice her ideals and remains stubbornly single. But among the pampered women and minor nobility Edith finds Mr Neville, and her chance to escape from a life of humiliating loneliness is renewed . . .

'A classic . . . a book which will be read with pleasure a hundred years from now' Spectator

'A smashing love story. It is very romantic. It is also humorous, witty, touching and formidably clever' The Times

'Hotel du Lac is written with a beautiful grave formality, and it catches at the heart' Observer

'Her technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding' Hilary Mantel, Guardian

'She is one of the great writers of contemporary fiction' Literary Review