Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

Overview

A novel about the 50-year friendship of two dissimilar German refugees brought over to England as children from Nazi Germany. Their friendship becomes a funny yet touching model for the ways in which human beings come to terms with the tragedy of living.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679726685
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/19/1990
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	658,132
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, was a lifelong Londoner. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. She is the author of twenty-seven books, including the Booker Prize–winning novel Hotel Du Lac. She died in 2016.

Editorial Reviews

"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 Publisher

''Latecomers'' is an extraordinarily eloquent novel, full of pleasures as well as lessons. In a relatively short span of pages, Ms. Brookner gives us the lives of all these characters, their tragic beginnings as well as their resolutions in old or middle age.Ms. Brookner, so adept at articulating discomfort, maintains all her familiar masteries here, yet seems to have reached an apotheosis of her own. In ''Latecomers,'' she has given us a novel that teaches its readers ''to be free, and, once free, to be brave''. -- New York Times

David Leavitt

This tender study of a friendship between two men is extraordinary for the beauty of its prose and its sheer depth of feeling. Hartmann and Fibich, united as schoolboys when they were refugees from the Nazis, are now partners in a London printing business--and respond to their shared past in quite different ways. ``Brookner has produced a quiet little masterpiece,'' said PW. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Separated from their families in Nazi Germany, Fibich and Hartmann grow up in England to become inseparable allies, friends, and business partners. Charming Hartmann chooses to live in the present with every sybaritic comfort, while gloomy Fibich must live in the present because he fears the future and is haunted by a past he cannot remember. With little plot or dialogue, the book is a detailed character study of two gentle men and their contrasting wives and children. It will appeal to readers who appreciate fine writing but not to those who demand vicarious excitement from a novel. Brookner is well known as author of Hotel du Lac, Providence , and other books.-- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.

Library Journal