A Start in Life

‘Excellent’ Sunday Times
‘Enormously sophisticated’ Financial Times

'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'

Dr Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.

As she revisits her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs of years gone by, she begins to wonder whether perhaps there might still be a chance for a new start in life . . .

‘A delight … Amusing and beautifully written’ The Times

‘The unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist’ Helen Dunmore, The Times, praise for Anita Brookner

‘Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night’ Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner