The Bay Of Angels - Softcover

Brookner, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241977835 ISBN 13: 9780241977835

Publisher: Penguin, 2016

Synopsis

'It was at Millie's party, on that Friday evening, that she met her second husband, my stepfather-to-be, and thus changed both our lives . . .'

Zoë is delighted when her widowed mother marries 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. Zoë and her mother, finding themselves surrounded by well-meaning strangers, must learn how and how not to trust appearances . . .

'One of her very best - possibly her finest . . . reverberates long after it's put down ... Brookner in all her wisdom, eloquence and power' Spectator

About this title

Review:

Anita Brookner's 20th novel is another superb, touching and honest meditation on marriage, feminism and filial duty. The Bay of Angels is a finely crafted, affecting story of an intelligent, independent woman, Zoe Cunningham, working through her responsibilities to herself, her mother and her sex. Brookner's opening chapter is a masterclass, moving her heroine from childhood through to her late teens in broad but heightened detail; it showcases all her skills in presenting a character, in the first person, and that character's motivations, self-analysis and hopes. The reader is immediately brought in to Zoe's confidence and feels a close empathy with, and minute understanding of, her world.

Zoe is a singular, although not a lonely child, bookish, observant, temperate but also a lover of fairy tales and the escapes they seem to offer. Her mother echoes these characteristics but, in her, they evidence something a little more diminished. Remarkably, forced out by well-meaning relatives to a social event she would much rather avoid, her mother meets and marries the kind, ebullient Simon. Simon seems to Zoe like a Santa Claus figure, a figure that seems to confirm her trust in fairy tales, who has rescued her mother from long afternoons, and longer evenings, of waiting. She wonders if perhaps now someone will rescue her.

Gentle tragedies, and a dissection of loneliness and the flawed routes out of it offered to women, follow. We become captivated by Zoe's world and by Brookner's rendering of her inner life. Brookner has been at the height of her powers for so long that words like genius and masterpiece flow easily. The astonishing thing is that these words must be invoked to do this level of writing any justice at all. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

Tough, cogent writing, without sentimentality, and its polish never masks its realism. ... Brookner reveals herself as a European novelist and a major one.' (Helen Dunmore The Times)

With a steelier grip than almost any other writer, Brookner always reaches out and pulls you in. Her talent for immersing you in the pinched, emotional life of her characters is unparalleled... Her understanding of female loneliness is heart-clenching. (Julie Myerson Mail on Sunday)

Achieved with the subtle brilliance for which Booker Prize-winning Brookner has received such acclaim... It is highly unlikely you will read a finer piece of literature this year (Scotland on Sunday)

What a relief it is to read this beautifully crafted prose (Daily Express)

One of Brookner's most subtle, original and emotionally resonant works... She subverts expectations again (Sunday Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0241977835
• ISBN 13: 9780241977835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224