Lewis Percy

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.

"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