Anita Brookner is famous for her quiet, incisive studies of solitary and emotionally restrained characters --- often middle-class women --- navigating loneliness, disappointment and small eruptions of desire beneath a façade of reserve. Yet as Hermione Lee demonstrates in her captivating and absorbing biography, Brookner the writer was the inventor of those lonely women, not their alter ego. Brookner herself was formidable, witty, elegant, precise and controlled. She was the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge. At her death in 2016, she left behind 25 novels, but very few personal papers survived. Now, in Hermione Lee’s book, Brookner’s character is revealed to us. This luminous portrait seamlessly weaves life and work into a vivid, insightful and riveting narrative that sheds a penetrating light on a writer --- and woman --- like no other.

Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary genres: theater, radio, film, TV, journalism and fiction. His most acclaimed creations --- "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "The Real Thing," "Arcadia," "The Coast of Utopia," "Shakespeare in Love" --- remain as fresh and moving as when they entranced their first audiences. Hermione Lee's absorbing biography seamlessly weaves Stoppard's life and work together into a vivid, insightful and always riveting portrait of a remarkable man.