Visitors
A Novel
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The extraordinary Anita Brookner gives us a brilliant novel about age and awakening. In Visitors, Brookner explores what happens when a woman's quiet resignation to fate is challenged by the arrogance of youth.
Dorothea May is most at ease in the company of strangers -- so when she is prevailed upon to take in a young man in town for a family wedding, her carefully constructed, solitary world is thrown into disarray. As the wedding approaches, old family secrets surface and conflicts erupt between the generations. Dorothea's fragile façade of peaceful acceptance is pierced, forcing her to face in a new way both her past and her future.
Exquisite writing, richly drawn characters, and penetrating perceptions about people are featured in another superb novel from this acclaimed and award-winning writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When youth and age collide, the fallout, as charted by veteran Booker Prize winner Brookner, is funny, unexpected and moving. At 70, Dorothea May has been a widow 15 years. She enjoys the small freedoms of her dull but comfortable existence and just tolerates the only family she has--her husband's two cousins, Kitty and Molly, and their spouses. When Kitty's American granddaughter comes to London to get married, Kitty prevails on Thea to put the best man up at her flat for a few days. As it turns out, the groom, a self-described "bearer of the message of Jesus," and the bride, a homeopathic therapist who rejects the idea of dressing up "just to get hitched," aren't exactly the endearing young people Kitty has imagined. And Steve Best, the best man, is just as bad, a drifter whose ambitions seem limited to checking out the local music scene. But, as they spend more time together, and as old family skeletons pop out of the closet at wedding time, Thea comes to like Steve's solitary nature and his occasional bouts of wit. Brookner remains an exquisitely subtle observer of how manners bear the imprint of psyches. Her portrait of how the wedding tumult and Steve's presence make Thea aware of her interior life--and her dreams and recurring memories--is moving without being sentimental. In the end, it's a delight to watch Thea take courage upon entering her old age, which she describes, with a quiet excitement, as "a country without maps."
