Anita Brookner is the most misunderstood writer : people assume that all her books are the same and that they are peopled by lonely ladies in cardigans and are the most genteel fare.

In fact, she writes about all the things no one else dares to write about: solitude, loneliness, waiting for death, the triumph of the banal unexamined life over the careful and the thoughtful one. She is brave yet elegant, she never writes a clumsy sentence and she is sometimes almost aphoristic in her writing.

I think I will kill the next critic who says that all her novels are the same : they may be on the same themes, and about the same sort of people, but they are always shot through with such wisdom, such insight that each one is quite different.

I particularly love Providence, because it's all about the ways we misconstrue and misunderstand the world around us; Family and Friends because she broadens her canvas in this book -- told from the point of view of two men as well as two women; Falling Slowly because it is so moving about loneliness and childlessness; and The Bay of Angels in contrast to this because it so good on the success of the single life.

Juliet Annan, Anita Brookner's Editor at Viking