The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner is a lofty writer.  She was awarded the Booker Prize for Hotel Du Lac and is a Prof. @ Cambridge.  Brookner is a prolific writer with deceiptively simplistic plots.  In The Bay of Angels, our heroine, Zoe, loses her father at a very young age & is raised lovingly as an only child in an isolated existence with her mother.  Years later, when Zoe is a college student, her mother remarries and moves from their home in London to the south of France with her elderly husband.  Zoe's co-dependence on her mother, Anne, leaves her with ambivalent feelings of loneliness & freedom.  Just a few years into the marriage, Zoe's step-father dies leaving Zoe the onus of caring for her mother who suffers a mental breakdown.  Zoe leaves London to care for her flailing mother in France, putting her in a state of limbo until Anne too soon passes.  The plot is not the driving force of the novel.  The significance comes from Zoe's astute observations on life.  Zoe reflects on both her mother's life and her own. "One lives uncomfortably with one's mistakes; one never entirely comes to terms with them."  After Anne dies, Zoe comprehends how the other women in the care facility perceive her.  "They pitied my freedom, my unsought freedom, as I did.  They did not see how one could live without attachments, and neither did I."  As Clooney said in the film Up in the Air, "Life is better with company."  The Bay of Angels shares this sentiment but is a heavenly way to spend time when one is alone.