Which Anita Brookner novel won the 1984 Booker Prize?

Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize for Anita Brookner.

The novel centres on Edith Hope, a romance novelist staying at a hotel on the shore of Lake Geneva after a failed engagement and a complicated affair with a married man. Away from home, Edith observes the other English guests while reconsidering what she wants from love, independence and respectability.

Brookner’s restrained, ironic style helped make the book distinctive. Its intimate setting and focus on one woman’s emotional calculations can make it seem slight beside larger historical novels, but the psychological tension is deliberate. Edith’s eventual rejection of the womanising Mr Neville becomes a decisive act of self-knowledge.

The win was regarded as a surprise by some critics, and Brookner herself reportedly thought J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun might have been a stronger winner. Hotel du Lac was later adapted into a 1986 television film starring Anna Massey.