This second-last of her novels was to me her most boring and pointless one. All the Brookner tropes were in it: the lonely woman, the inheritance, the buying of a flat, the detached friendships, all the assumptions about other people, the almost relationships, Paris.
Sadly though, this time she failed to add any new direction or insight, it was just the same old. And I found her main protagonist unsympathetic, which didn’t help.

Luckily there’s always Brookner’s glorious writing style that makes even her lesser books enjoyable enough to read.

Really great.

Spoiler: she leaves. ( )

I always enjoy reading Anita Brookner. Her books are generally smart, concise, and a little sad. [Leaving Home] was all of those. Emma is in her early 20s on the brink of adulthood. She leaves her mother in England to live in Paris and work on a book about gardens. Emma is a quiet, solitary person. She makes only a few friends throughout the book and tries to strike out on her own. Nothing much happens, but Brookner writes beautiful sentences and I love to dwell in her writing.

This is not an exciting or particularly memorable book, but it's the kind of book that reminds me how much I love the act of reading. ( )

Brookner, Anita
Leaving Home

Fiction
On the surface, Leaving Home is about a woman trying to reach a decision about her future and is typical of Anita Brookner’s writing. Brookner specializes in real people, unheroic and almost insanely normal. Their outer lives may appear dull, possibly pathetic, but their inner lives are rich with observation, imagination, and projection. They turn the minor events in their lives into adventures and the major events into only temporary excursions away from their practically unassailable equilibrium. The life of the mind makes these people rich and shows up the pursuits of their more active and adventurous counterparts as being shallow and futile. Read Brookner for her character development and a break from writers that try too hard to stimulate only to exhaust or at best provide only a temporary escape. You will think about her characters long after you've finished her books as if you'd actually met them. Her people think and analyze; perhaps a habit we could all benefit from developing.
Recommended April 2008

Tells the story of Emma Roberts, her friend Francoise. Denoys, her flat in London and room in Paris. It explores attachment between mothers and daughters, French idea of property and inheritance, friendships and loneliness. I liked the way Emma eventually rises above her anxieties and becomes accepting, even serene in her life and its prospects. ( )