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The impressive bibliography of Dr Anita Brookner CBE begins in the 1960s with works such as Ingres and Watteau, dating from the period when this quietly formidable Englishwoman was in phase one of her doubly brilliant career. Before becoming a Booker-winning novelist in her fifties (Hotel du Lac won in 1984; The Next Big Thing longlisted in 2002), she was the first female Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge. Only she isn’t an Englishwoman. Or is she? That is the puzzle at the heart of many of her intense novels of ordinary life and people who don’t fit in to it. Often, her characters are, like her, children of immigrants who can’t shake off the feeling of being extra. Not for her the multiple, magical refractions of much late-20th-century Brit lit — but unlike many of her contemporaries, it is hard to imagine her taut, spare prose going out of fashion.

One to read: Hotel Du Lac (1984)

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