Latecomers (New [ed.])

'No man is free of his own history' Hartmann and Fibich came to England on the kindertransport.

As orphans of the war they were strangers in a strange land.

Together, they survived. And in adulthood they have been unable to separate, sharing a successful business. Yet 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.

Together these two men seek to build a future from the shaky foundations of their own pasts . . . 'Like Virginia Woolf, Brookner's aim is not to draw characters in the round, but to reveal psychological reality in the deep' The Times