A Start in Life

By Anita Brookner

Recommended By David Nicholls

Because she’s so wonderful on loneliness and the disappointments of love. ‘A Start in Life’ and ‘Look At Me’ are my favourites, but I love them all.

~ David Nicholls

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Publish Date: 1981

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 not salvation but enlightenment.

Yet in revisiting her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs, she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life …

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