About the Author

Anita Brookner, who is an international authority on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art. In 1968 she was Slade Professor at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold this position. She is the author of Watteau, the Genius of the Future; Greuze and Jacques-Louis David. She has written five novels: A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize in 1984 and Family and Friends in 1985. (1985)

Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from three postgraduate years in Paris, has lived there all her life. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988, when she abandoned her title of Reader in the History of Art at the University of London for the anonymity of a small flat in Chelsea and the cultivation of certain fictional characters who may one day appear in future novels. (1991)

Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from three postgraduate years in Paris, has lived there all her life. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was Reader until 1988. She now reads and writes for her own amusement. (1996)

Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928 and, apart from several years in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. Strangers is her twenty-fourth novel. (2009)