Latecomers - Softcover

Brookner, Anita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586205225 ISBN 13: 9780586205228

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1989

Synopsis

A novel about human relationships, focusing, unusually for Brookner, on two male characters. Hartmann and Fibich met at school and forty years later they can no more think of living apart than of divorcing their wives. This book deals with their gradual coming to terms with the emotional gaps in their lives. Anita Brookner is also the author of "A Start in Life", "Providence", "Look At Me", "Hotel du Lac" which won the 1984 Booker Prize, "Family and Friends" and "A Misalliance". She is an international authority on 18th century art and teaches at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

About this title

Review

"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

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 illuminating depiction of her characters' inner lives makes Latecomers a brilliant, accomplished work."

-- San Francisco Chronicle

From the Back Cover

Sent to London as refugees during the second world war, Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich become lifelong friends and eventually business partners. Over the years, Hartmann has settled for a life of pleasure, seldom disturbed by his difficult past; Fibich endures a life of gloom, his mind never straying from the last sight he had of his mother, fainting on a railway platform. But both are troubled by the same profound and unfocused longing, and as they approach old age, the need to exorcise and understand the ghosts of their past.

“She has never written a better novel. There are only inadequate words (except her own) in which to convey how searchingly gentle it is, how almost unbearably moving.”
RUTH RENDELL, 'Observer'

“The best novel Anita Brookner has written since the Booker Prize-winning 'Hotel du Lac'. It marks an advance into new territory, while preserving all her old sharp intelligence and shrewdness.”
SUSAN HILL, 'Good Housekeeping'

“A book of such charm, such depth, such poignant detail and compassionate understanding that, reading it, you may find tears mingling with laughter.”
'Daily Mail'

“Anita Brookner has proved herself to be so fine a novelist that she deserves to be judged in a class of her own.”
'Daily Telegraph'

“All the satisfactions to be found in her best work are here.”
'Sunday Times'

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0586205225
• ISBN 13: 9780586205228
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240