Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize in 1984, beating both Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot and JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. It was seen by some critics as a surprise winner. Its author, Anita Brookner, died on March 10, 2016 at the age of 87.

“Hotel du Lac is a novel of another era, a self-contained, wrily observed bridge between the defined roles and mannerisms of Austen’s literary women and the depressed self-definition of Doris Lessing’s heroines,” observes writer Glenda Burgess. It tells the story of romance novelist Edith Hope, “who is herself awkward and unsuccessful at love and gets caught in a scandal of her own inept making, forced to seek refuge in a grand but out of the way old European hotel.”

Her life, she realises, has begun to resemble the plots of her own works, but the escape to Hotel du Lac doesn’t give her the peace and resolution she urgently needs. Instead, she finds herself in the midst of others like her, including a worldly, attractive, middle-aged man, whose attentions and affections she can’t easily ignore.

“Her novels often feature lonely spinsters, who seem to do little except return their library books, visit tea rooms, and reflect on unlived lives. But she was no more her female protagonists than John Updike was Rabbit Angstrom. Her novels were what they were; they played to her strengths, of clarity, irony, wit, insight. Her voice was recognisable from the opening line,” says Julian Barnes who, apart from being a peer, was also her close friend and a confidant.

Described as a beautifully written study in melancholy, Hotel du Lac became one of the top ten bestselling books of the 1980s and was adapted for a BBC television drama in 1986.

Published in 1984.