Making Things Better: A Novel

The Booker Prize—winning author of The Bay of Angels and Hotel du Lac, “one of the finest novelists of her generation” (The New York Times), now gives us a masterly new novel about the self-discoveries that come with maturity, and the eternal question confronted by people of all ages: What will I do with the rest of my life?

In this richly written, emotionally revealing novel, Brookner once again “works a spell on the reader” (The Washington Post Book World), as a man finds himself contemplating the difficult life questions: How is it all going to work out? What shall I do before the end? As Herz ponders proposing marriage to an old friend, making a trip to Paris to see a favorite painting, selling his home, moving, starting afresh, he knows that he must do something with his remaining years. But what?

Brilliant, funny, profound, Making Things Better captures the quandaries of aging: the misunderstanding of an increasingly modern, alien world; awkward conversations with passersby; even more awkward encounters with longtime friends and acquaintances; the anxieties posed by age and uncertainty—and the bizarre, magnificent self-knowledge that perhaps only age, reflection, and experience can bring.