Kitty Maule wants to be 'totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful.' Instead, she is clever, hesitant and too patient for her own good. For years, she has been in love with her colleague Maurice Bishop, a charming English lecturer who seems not to notice her feelings. But when there comes a chance to accompany Maurice to France on a study of French cathedrals, Kitty sees an opporunity to be the woman she has always wanted to be as well as at last make the man she wants fall in love with her. But why is that the closer she gets to Maurice, the more elusive he seems to become?

Review
"Providence recounts, with elegance and precision, the story of a woman's efforts to create a new life for herself ... Brookner has proved herself a master."-- The New York Times

"Ambitious and disturbing ... uncommonly deft, witty and serious." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Anita Brookner's themes -- experience, nationality, faith, innocence and betrayal -- evoke the pleasures of reading Henry James. [Providence is] an intelligent and moving novel." -- Francine Prose

"[A] perfectly observed and quietly witty novel."-- Washington Post

About the Author
Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.