Product Description

When cautious Emma Roberts goes to France to carry out research into seventeenth century garden design, she finds a reliable diversion from her studies in her unlikely new friend Francoise Desnoyers, in whose beautiful house she is welcomed as a guest. She is not too dazzled to ignore the tensions that exist between Francoise and her formidable mother, or between Mme. Desnoyers and her other guests. London recedes into the background as life in France becomes more significant in every respect. It is not until the horrifying episode that puts an end to this fascination, that Emma is reconciled to her duller but safer life at home and to the compromises that she comes to accept.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #108143 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From the Inside Flap
"On my conscientious visits to what had once been real gardens,
to Vaux-le-Vicomte or Marly-le-Roi, I came into more meaningful contact
with my subject. In those dignified but deserted spaces I could appreciate
the symmetry which I had once thought rigid. I now saw that it was guarded
secret, and if it enshrined my melancholy it also celebrated a divine
proportion"

From the Back Cover
`Enthralling ... so beautifully observed ... as captivating as any thriller' Marie Claire

`Spare and devastating, powerful. Brookner is an unflinching novelist who writes beautifully and fearlessly' Independent

`Elegiac ... its magnificent final sentence is among the most moving of Brooknerian conclusions' New Statesman

`Clever and elegant' Sunday Times

`Brookner is brilliant ... readers will not be disappointed. Her women are very real, more recognizable and more human than any obviously loveable character could hope to be' Sunday Herald

`So well done - so carefully is the novel wrought - that reading it offers deep and enduring pleasure' Scotsman

About the Author
Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She lives in SW10. Leaving Home is her 23rd novel.

Customer Reviews

Leaving Home
This book will be enjoyable to Brookner fans as it contains many of her trademark features, long walks, empty Sundays, coffee, a healthy income(although not at the beginning of the book, it does come later)visits to Selfridges Food Hall and a French connection. Most of all it has long paragraphs of prose which engulf the reader into Brookner-land where many of us would like to live permanently. The story starts out carefully, introducing Emma and her plans to escape to France to persue her studies on a very tight budget. She leaves behind her sparse family, and lives as something of an outsider, befriending an outgoing French girl into whose family she becomes embroiled.As the book progresses, Emma gradually grows into independence and accepts herself and her situation.

Anita Brookner is a novelist who takes a small canvas and paints her story with precision. This book is unlikely to be of interest to those who like fast moving or adventurous plots, but will please readers who like to find out all the details of the characters and to savour rich and well constructed prose.

Another Masterpiece in Muted Tones
Anita Brookner is one of the few authors I know who use librarians as major characters. Perhaps that is why I kept comparing Leaving Home, featuring the ebullient librarian Francoise Desnoyers, with the early offering Look At Me, with its bewildered narrator, librarian Frances (Fanny) Hinton.

Emma Roberts, the narrator of Leaving Home, and Frances Hinton, start from the same circumstances, a cloistral relationship with a dependant widowed mother, and consequent desire to batten onto a stronger personality in order to begin to experience life: "It was therefore somehow appropriate [. . .] that I should attach myself to a surrogate whom I saw as capable as acting as a mentor." (Leaving Home, p. 6). In Emma's case the surrogate is Francoise, a breezy, willful and outspoken Frenchwoman whose overly close relationship to her domineering mother parallels Emma's own. Frances is drawn to the equally charismatic Nick and Alix. Initially, the passive, dependant Emma threatens to retrace Frances' footsteps. When the character of Michael was introduced, I smugly assumed I knew right where the plot was headed. I happily admit I was wrong.

In the twenty years separating the two novels, the narrator's worldview has taken an upturn. While the retiring Frances cannot confront or influence the unequal relationships in her life and capitualtes to stronger wills than hers, Emma mangages to take comparatively forthright and decisive action with her friends and lovers. It is Frances' tragedy that she does not realize, as Emma does, "It was even possible that others might not have my best interests at heart, might prove as intent on their own destiny as I had thought to be on mine." (Leaving Home, p. 116)

Leaving Home is also one of the few novels by Dr. Brookner I can recall where the protagonist shows a religious sensibility. Emma's refreshment in Saint-Sulpice stands in contrast with the horrifying visit to Saint Denis by Kitty Maule in Providence.

(I just noticed that many of Dr. Brookner's heroines (Kitty, Julia, Fanny, Emma) share first names with those of Jane Austen!)

This is a beautifully written novel, full of substance. It rewards careful reading.

Leaving Home
Emma, a submissive and uncertain "good daughter" living with her frail mother in their London flat is contrasted against a dominant and impulsive French friend, Francoise, also with mother difficulties. By the end, it is Francoise who is resigned to submit to her mother's wishes and Emma who begins to take control of her life when the alternatives seem too much to bear. The catalyst in both cases is loss and the necessities that it creates. Left to our own initiative, such changes are rarely accomplished. Brookner's territory in this novel is the intimate dance between order and passion as it manifests in history, garden design, the relations between people, and in the internal, even subliminal, struggles between mind and heart. It is our demand for a guiding principle to interpret and wrestle with the uncertainties of life that seems to give rise in each of us either to a striving for order as a symbol of safety or for the following of our passions as a symbol of freedom. In the end, we each could do with more of what we are not. This is some of Brookner's most succinct, yet fully satisfying writing to date.