Latecomers

Author: Anita Brookner

Format: Paperback

'She has never written a better novel' — Ruth Rendell
'Quietly commanding' — Hilary Mantel

'No man is free of his own history'

Hartmann and Fibich came to England on the Kindertransport: orphans of the war, and strangers in a strange land. Together, they survived.

Now, in adulthood, they have been unable to separate. They share a successful business, but they are also bound by the shaky foundations of their own pasts. Hartmann's carefully polished manners conceal the past he refuses to think about, while Fibich, a mass of fears and neuroses, can do nothing but remember.

Their friendship steers them through the decades, as they become husbands, fathers, men. And then comes the day when Fibich must make the journey back to Berlin, to the railway station where he last saw his mother . . .

'One of the warmest of her novels, rich with family affection, shadowed by history' — Tessa Hadley

'The last great novelist of the twentieth century' — Daily Telegraph

'Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night' — Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner

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 after holding a post as a professor at Cambridge University and spending several years in Paris, she 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. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner published a number of volumes of art criticism. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990. She died in 2016 at the age of 87.

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