Book Synopsis

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER - In the novel that established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new way to frame the eternal question, "Why love?"

"Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." --Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

When middle-aged romance writer Edith Hope's life begins to resemble the melodramatic plots of her own novels, her friends banish her to Switzerland, where they hope the luxurious calm of the Hotel du Lac will restore her to her senses. But instead of contritely contemplating her mistakes, Edith spends her time keenly observing her eccentric fellow guests and writing unsent letters to the married lover she is supposed to be trying to forget. Before long, despite her determination to stay quietly on the sidelines, Edith attracts the attention of a worldly man who believes that they are uniquely situated to solve each other's problems. Beautifully observed and witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.

Review Quotes

"Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." --Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review

"Impeccably written and suffused with pleasing wit." --Newsweek

"Distinctive, spellbinding ... elegant but passionate, funny but oddly earnest.... Novels like hers are why we read novels." --Christian Science Monitor

"A remarkable novel ... Anita Brookner's best." --The Sunday Times (London)

About the 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.