Lewis Percy

Anita Brookner is justly famous for her elegant, almost Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in Lewis Percy, she performs a remarkable leap of imaginative empathy in her portrayal of a man torn between the reassuring cloister of the library and the alluring but terrifying world of the senses, a world populated by women who persist in bewildering him.

"Each new Brookner novel...guarantees the pleasures of a mature intelligence, felicitous language, quirky humor, intensely believable characters, bitter-sweet karma and shapely narrative....A brilliantly executed novel."

-- Phillip Lopate,

The New York Times Book Review"Anita Brookner never ceases to surprise. In this sly and delectable fiction...an artist has extended her range."-Boston Globe

"Confirms Anita Brookner's reputation as a novelist....There is a solemn felicity, a classical sense of fairness inherent in Lewis Percy. This, with the author's sane humor, told in her elegant, lucid prose, combines to make something truly remarkable."

-- San Francisco Chronicle