The Next Big Thing - Hardcover

Anita Brookner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670913022 ISBN 13: 9780670913022

Publisher: Penguin, 2002

Synopsis

'Herz wondered if the people he passed on the street ruminated on lost causes, as he did. Try as he might to divert himself, he could never escape the suspicion that he should be elsewhere.' Herz is seventy-three and facing the difficult question: what is he going to do with the rest of his life? How is it all going to end? He could propose marriage to an old friend he hasn't seen for thirty years; he could travel, he could make a trip to Paris to see a favourite painting; he could sell his flat, move, start afresh. He must do something with the time left but what?

About this title

About the Author:

Novelist and art historian, Dr Anita Brookner, was born in London on 16 July 1928. She studied at King's College, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She spent three years studying in Paris as a postgraduate, and went on to lecture in art at Reading University and the Courtauld Institute, where she specialized in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. She became the first woman to be named as Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University in 1967. Her first novel, A Start in Life, was published in 1981. Hotel du Lac (1984), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was adapted for television in 1986. The Bay of Angels (2001), concerns a single woman coming to terms with a new sense of freedom when her widowed mother re-marries and moves abroad. The Rules of Engagement (2003), her twenty-second novel, is a story about friendship and choices.A Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, Anita Brookner lives in London. She was made a CBE in 1990. Her most recent non-fiction book is Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000), and her most recent novel is Strangers (2009). In 2011 the novella At the Hairdressers was published as an e-book.

From AudioFile:

Award-winning British author Anita Brookner is known for her intelligent novels, character-driven stories that focus on the inner lives of apparently placid people whose most dramatic action may be inaction. In this one a 73-year-old man who has lived a quiet life as a bookseller considers what to do with the time he has left. Travel? Propose marriage to a friend he hasn't seen in thirty years? Move? But where? While exquisite, Brookner's studied, reflective style could be deadly in the hands of a less talented narrator. Stephen Thorne evokes Brookner's measured writing while modifying his pace and rhythm to color the story. And he enlivens the characters with a judicious mix of accents and verbal mannerisms. An impressive performance and an interesting listen. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670913022
• ISBN 13: 9780670913022
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256