The novelist, who won the Booker for her novel Hotel du Lac, died peacefully in her sleep on Thursday, according to a notice of her death in The Times newspaper.
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In a statement to the Times, the writer Jilly Cooper praised Brookner as a “wonderful writer” whose keen powers of observation fertilized “wonderful lucid prose”.
Brookner was a very private individual who shied away from interviews and book signings.
After writing several books on the subject in the 1960s and 1970s, she turned her concentration to fiction, before winning the Booker prize as an outsider.
Her novels often involved lonely female protagonists.
This week her publisher said Brookner “had such a highly developed sense of what was morally right…”
Born in 1928, Brookner was the only child of Polish Jewish parents who opened their London home to refugees escaping persecution by the Nazis during World War Two. “I am used as a listener by a great many people”, she said. She went on to write 24 books, many examining “middle class loneliness”, and taught art history at the University of Cambridge where, in 1967, she became the first woman to be named as Slade professor of art.
Brookner never married and had no children.
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Over a career spanning half a century she published 25 books, her last the 2011 novella At The Hairdressers. In 2009, in an interview published in The Telegraph, she intimated that the latter had been a source of regret in her life.
