Latecomers

'No man is free of his own history.'

The latecomers are Hartmann and Fibich, brought over to England as children to escape Nazi Germany, now living close to each other in London in their 60s, and still friends. Yet they could not be more different, each having adopted different strategies to reconcile themselves with their past and to cope with an uncertain world.

'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