Bøger af Anita Brookner

'Without warning, it seemed, she had become a married woman.'Naive and undemanding, Harriet Lytton expects very little of life and that is what she recieves. Married to a respectable man old enough to be her father, Harriet's only taste of passion comes when she meets Jack Peckham, the unruly, attractive husband of her friend Tessa.Tessa and Harriet have for many years been bound together by their childhood friendship and the imposed alliance of their two daughters, Imogen and Lizzie. But events conspire to shatter the gentle rhythm of Harriet's life. Tragically restrained by her own cautious choices, she faces the cruellest losses of all: those of hope and desire.

'Oh, she'll turn up all right. Somewhere or other. Trouble is, we won't know where to look.'Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Anna Durrant's acquaintances realize that Anna has gone missing. Normally so reliable, so helpful, she has neglected what duties remain to her after the death of her mother and taken flight. Lawrence Halliday, the family doctor, trapped in a trying marriage to the predatory Vickie, is the first to notice Anna's disappearance. Mrs Marsh, a critical friend of Anna's mother, had hoped that her arrogant son Nick might take an interest in Anna, but he is seeking greater sophistication and worldliness. And as for Anna herself, she has not so much disappeared as ceased to exist as the woman they all thought they knew.

'I never liked her, nor did she like me; strange, then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.'Fay Langdon has relinquished her singing career to marry Owen, a highly successful solicitor. At one of their dinner parties Fay meets the glamorous, self-obsessed Julia and is destined to join the handful of acolytes who provide Julia with ammunition for her merciless scorn and disapprobation. As the years pass and Fay and Julia's lives grow empty of purpose, they are drawn together by their fear of age and isolation. Yet a mutual mistrust continues to exist between them until Fay is driven to one last heroic act.

'The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.'Destined to be a haunter of libraries, Lewis's cautious progress through life reveals to him only his own shortcomings. Estranged from his wife and daughter, he searches for an alternative. This novel presents the life and aspirations of one man who remains out of step with his times.

Beginning with a wedding photograph, this story charts the loves and lives of a family and their friends, following each of them through their own struggles, triumphs and sorrows.

Frances Hinton is shy and clever. By day she works in a medical library and every evening she goes back to the solitude of her London flat to write fiction. When she is adopted by Nick and his wife, she is ripe to begin her sentimental education.

Kitty Maule wants to be 'totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful.'Instead, she is clever, hesitant and too patient for her own good. For years, she has been in love with her colleague Maurice Bishop, a charming English lecturer who seems not to notice her feelings. But when there comes a chance to accompany Maurice to France on a study of French cathedrals, Kitty sees an opporunity to be the woman she has always wanted to be as well as at last make the man she wants fall in love with her. But why is that the closer she gets to Maurice, the more elusive he seems to become?

Since childhood, Ruth Weiss has been escaping from life into books, from the hothouse attentions of her parents into the warmth of lovers and friends. Now Dr Weiss, at 40, knows that her life has been ruined by literature and that once again she must make a new start.

'She hoped one day to find the image she unconsciously sought, without knowing why she sought it, something to lift the spirits, to transport her on an imaginary journey, to give a hint of the transcendence which was so blatantly lacking in her everyday life of words and paper.'Beatrice and Miriam are sisters, sharing little except a traditional childhood that has left them burdened with unhappy memories.Beatrice is a pianist, a romantic, who believes in love, while Miriam, who married the rather colourless Jonathan Eldon for pragmatic reasons, companionship, status, is not beyond disillusionment. Following her divorce, she returns to Beatrice, who is beginning to appear fragile. While they share a home and a few acquaintances, neither confides to the other what is in their hearts.For the beautiful Beatrice, now prepared to settle for friendship and closeness rather than passion, there is Max and the hope of the carving a contented future with him. For Miriam there is love and esteem - and, finally, certainty.

'He was not trained for freedom, that was the problem, had not been brought up for it.'At seventy-three, Herz is facing an increasingly bewildering world. He cannot see his place in it or even work out what to do with his final years. Questions and misunderstandings haunt Herz like old ghosts. Should he travel, sell his flat, or propose marriage to a friend he has not seen in thirty years? The letters he writes and does not send and the passers-by he encounters remind him how out of touch he is, how detached from the modern world. Yet Herz believes that he must do something, only he doesn't know what this next big thing in life should be . . .

'Within a few weeks, it seemed, the fixed points of my existence had revealed themselves to be untrustworthy.'Zo is delighted when her widowed mother maries Simon, a generous older man who owns a villa in Nice. However, the long enchanted visits to France she enjoys come to an abrupt end when Simon suffers a bad fall. Zo and her mother, finding themselves surounded by well-meaning strangers, must learn how and how not to trust appearances . . .