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Leaving Home by Anita Brookner
The protagonist in Leaving Home is Emma Roberts, a 26-year old graduate student still living with her widowed mother in London. Their life is solitary and melancholy and Emma is sure she needs to set out on her own to find a different life. She goes to Paris to continue her studies and meets Francoise, also raised alone by a widowed mother. Francoise, though, is lively and gregarious compared to Emma's quiet and lonely life. Although Emma would like to break out of her routine life, she constantly makes choices, including the men she dates, that reinforces her lifestyle. She moves back and forth between London and Paris, finding her home in neither place. Francoise finds a different dilemma, either marry the man her mother has chosen or run away with her lover. Anita Brookner's novel has received mostly positive reviews with the Baltimore Sun saying, "Brookner has acquitted herself of another literary tour de force: Leaving Home is keen and tempered and deeply, satisfyingly painful."
