Latecomers (1988), by Anita Brookner

As you can see from my reviews of Anita Brookner’s novels which are within the obituary I wrote on the occasion of her death in 2016, I thought I had her ‘pegged’ as an author of bitter-sweet stories of intelligent middle-class older women reflecting on their poor choices and their wasted lives.  These women were emotionally stilted, isolated from society and disappointed by men.  I admired her writing, her brilliantly perceptive descriptions and her often droll style, but I always had to be ‘in the mood’ to read a Brookner.

But…

An episode of Backlisted (about Raymond Chandler, of all people!) began as usual with the chat about who’d been reading what, and Andy Miller told the listeners about a Brookner novel I didn’t know, quite different to the others I had read:

Latecomers, he said, is an incredibly moving book about two men who came to England as…