Latecomers

In Latecomers the author of the bestselling Hotel Du Lac extends her range to produce a glowing masterpiece about the ambiguous pleasures of friendship and domesticity. Hartmann and Fibich are "latecomers" to England, brought over as children from Nazi Germany. No two men could be more dissimilar: Hartmann is an expansive, deliberately unreflective voluptuary; Fibich, the ascetic, lives in a perpetual swoon of homesickness and terror. But as imagined by Anita Brookner, their fifty-year friendship becomes a transcendently funny and touching model for the ways in which human beings come to terms with the tragedy of living.

"Brookner's most touching novel...She has transcended the struggle between men and women to arrive at...truth; as if having solved the mysteries of love, she has moved on to the meaning of life."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"Brookner's illuminating depiction of her characters' inner lives makes Latecomers a brilliant, accomplished work."— San Francisco Chronicle