Making Things Better

*** Original Title:  The Next Big Thing

Darkly comic and deeply sympathetic, Anita Brookner’s novel simply asks: if you were finally free to make your own choices in life, what would you do?

At 73, Herz is facing an increasingly bewildering world. He cannot see his place in it or work out what to do with his final years. Questions and misunderstandings haunt him like old ghosts. Should he travel, sell his flat, or propose marriage to an old friend he has not seen in 30 years? Herz believes that he must do something, only he doesn't know what his next big thing in life should be..

"Brookner has no rivals when it comes to anatomizing complex emotions. Without question, an exceptional piece of writing."  -  Sunday Telegraph

"Brookner is a brilliant writer, her prose near perfect, and she captures extremely poignantly the loneliness, the anxieties, the insecurity of old age."  - Sunday Independent

Anita Brookner Over the course of 28 years, Brookner wrote 24 books. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her final one, Strangers, in 2009. She trained as an art historian and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.