Leaving Home

Thorndike Press, 2006-05-10. Hardcover. Near Fine. Hardcover, Large Print, illustrated boards, no DJ as issued. 2006, ISBN 0786285575. Small ink x mark to rear free endpaper. From the Booker Prize winning author, a Publishers Weekly Starred Review: "Brookner's narrators often combine a Jamesian inner life with a deceptively blank external one, and Emma Roberts is a paragon of that type. An English doctoral student in the late 1970s whose restraint matches her choice of studies—classical garden design—Emma grew up isolated with a widowed, reclusive mother. 'We loved each other greatly,' she says, 'yet so exclusive was that love that it was experienced more like anguish.' ... This isn't an Austen novel, and even an instant of unalloyed pleasure would seem glib after several pages of Emma's sere circumspection. That circumspection makes the novel very powerful, even as Emma's passivity is sometimes so extreme it feels concocted only to justify a few more elegant sentences. But Emma is among the most delicately rendered heroines in recent fiction." 260 pages.