Winner of the Booker Prize, the beautiful, romantic and gorgeously philosophical Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner is part of our Penguin Essential series which spotlights the very best of our modern classics \"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 ...

Sofka Dorn, widowed matriarch of a prosperous German Jewish family living in England, rules her four children with an exacting hand. Frederick, the eldest son, is a disgracefully charming \"ladies\" man, and like his flirtatious sister, Betty, is adored and indulged by his mother....

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

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....

\"He was haunted by a feeling of invisibility, as if he were a mere spectator of his own life, with no one to identify him in the barren circumstances of the here and now.\" Paul Sturgis is a retired banker manager who lives alone in a dark little flat....

\\\"Penguin Decades\\\" bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their......

Elizabeth and Betsy had been school friends in 1950s London. Elizabeth, prudent and introspective, values social propriety. Betsy, raised by a spinster aunt, is open, trusting, and desperate for affection. After growing up and going their separate ways, the two women reconnect later in life....

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question Why love? It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a psudonym....

Enigmatic Claire is 30 and lives alone. When she meets Martin Gibson, a faded scholar, she becomes inordinately interested. She is even more interested when she meets his wife, a far more spectacular personality. But the unexpected news of this......

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\"......