The Rules of Engagement

"Beautifully rendered. . . . Unexpectedly and intensely moving.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Few novelists can stand with Anita Brookner when it comes to the interior revelations of the human heart. . . . A single sentence, a certain expression, a look or a gesture convey worlds of meaning. . . . Every page has a felicity of wording that makes you want to reach for a pen, to underline passages that you don’t want to forget.” –The Seattle Times

"Beautifully written. . . . The Rules of Engagement demonstrates the triumph of a keenly introspective mind." –The Atlantic Monthly

“The Rules of Engagement is vintage Brookner in the grace and ease of its language. The Booker Prize-winning author is a gifted storyteller, weaving in twists and turns that make the book hard to abandon.” –Chicago Tribune

“Elizabeth Wetherall is clearly recognizable as one of Brookner’s exquisite gem solitaries. . . . To read Brookner is to come into contact with a first-rate mind. . . . [She] is relentlessly existential. But also comic.” –Miami Herald

“The story is told . . . with such elegance and polish that its surface–satiny, flawless and smooth as an onion, as always–holds a fascination equal to its content.” –The Washington Post Book World

“One of the great strengths of Brookner’s fiction: her ability to lay bare in limpid, measured, luminous prose her characters’ least admirable, most desperate motivations.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[Brookner renders] her characters with intense fidelity. Few novelists have such a subtle, portrait artist’s sense of their characters.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Brookner is a master of the art of the middle distance and as graceful as a matador when she uses the bright cape of her elegant Jamesian sentences to keep intimacy at bay.” –The Boston Globe