Family and Friends - Softcover

Brookner, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679781641 ISBN 13: 9780679781646

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1998

Synopsis

In an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in Family and Friends to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, focusing on the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars.
 
Presiding over the Dorn household is the formidable Sofka, an elegant and circumspect widow who watches as her four children find their way into adulthood. Frederick, the sybaritic eldest son, escapes to the comforts of the Riviera while stern, dutiful Alfred runs the family business and burns with unrealized longings; Betty—pleasure-loving, vain, and selfish—makes her ambitious way from Paris to Hollywood, leaving her dreamy, passive sister Mimi to languish at home. A brilliant social novel of lost innocence and the complex nature of family bonds, Family and Friends meticulously portrays the emotional cost of everyday life.

About this title

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.

From Library Journal:

Unlike Brookner's other novels, this one does not focus on a thirtyish, single woman but on a family of European descent living in England. If there is one major character, it is Sofka, the somewhat eccentric widowed matriarch, but her childrentwo boys, two girlsdivide up the reader's attention. Three of the four marry, with their wedding photographs providing jumping-off points for several story linesa neat device, cleverly handled. Family and Friends will appeal to readers who like the clean, spare prose which marks Brookner's works. She does what she does very well, pleasing a loyal audience. For fiction collections. Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679781641
• ISBN 13: 9780679781646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192