Anita Brookner is justly famous for her elegant, almost Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in Lewis Percy, she performs a remarkable leap of imaginative empathy in her portrayal of a man torn between the reassuring cloister of the library and the alluring but terrifying world of the senses, a world populated by women who persist in bewildering him.
Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, was a lifelong Londoner. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She is the author of twenty-seven books, including the Booker Prize–winning novel Hotel Du Lac. She died in 2016. View titles by Anita Brookner
"Each new Brookner novel...guarantees the pleasures of a mature intelligence, felicitous language, quirky humor, intensely believable characters, bitter-sweet karma and shapely narrative....A brilliantly executed novel."--Phillip Lopate, The New York Times Book Review

"Anita Brookner never ceases to surprise. In this sly and delectable fiction...an artist has extended her range."--Boston Globe

"Confirms Anita Brookner's reputation as a novelist....There is a solemn felicity, a classical sense of fairness inherent in Lewis Percy. This, with the author's sane humor, told in her elegant, lucid prose, combines to make something truly remarkable."--San Francisco Chronicle

About

Anita Brookner is justly famous for her elegant, almost Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in Lewis Percy, she performs a remarkable leap of imaginative empathy in her portrayal of a man torn between the reassuring cloister of the library and the alluring but terrifying world of the senses, a world populated by women who persist in bewildering him.

Author

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, was a lifelong Londoner. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She is the author of twenty-seven books, including the Booker Prize–winning novel Hotel Du Lac. She died in 2016. View titles by Anita Brookner

Praise

"Each new Brookner novel...guarantees the pleasures of a mature intelligence, felicitous language, quirky humor, intensely believable characters, bitter-sweet karma and shapely narrative....A brilliantly executed novel."--Phillip Lopate, The New York Times Book Review

"Anita Brookner never ceases to surprise. In this sly and delectable fiction...an artist has extended her range."--Boston Globe

"Confirms Anita Brookner's reputation as a novelist....There is a solemn felicity, a classical sense of fairness inherent in Lewis Percy. This, with the author's sane humor, told in her elegant, lucid prose, combines to make something truly remarkable."--San Francisco Chronicle