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. She is so closely associated with these protagonists, in fact, that many people imagine the author herself as a woman in a long gray cardigan, gazing out the window of a bleak London flat or onto the misty waters of a Swiss lake, yearning for an absent or unreliable lover. 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.

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.