Kathryn Hughes at Literary Review:
A restaurant meal with Anita Brookner went like this. She arrived on time, ordered the same thing – Dover sole with a glass of wine – and then, the moment the plates were cleared, she scarpered. The conversation was good – a mix of gossip about mutual acquaintances and, if you were up to it, French art and painting. The whole thing took an hour and a half, tops, but she preferred it shorter, because that gave her time for a cigarette before she set off back to the modest ex-council flat in Kensington where she had lived since the 1960s.
Dining with Brookner was a short, fastidious performance, qualities which also describe the novels she began to publish, at the rate of one a year, in late middle age. Her breakthrough was Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize in 1984 and has sold millions around the world.
more here.
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