Anita Brookner

Fay, celebrated ex-singer, meets the theatrical Julia and they begin a relationship of mutual distrust. It is a friendship sustained through loneliness, desperation and the morbid attraction of opposite characteristics as both women remain out of step with the time in which they live.

Hartmann and Fibich, childhood refugees from the Nazis, grow up in England where they become close friends and business partners in a London printing business. Hartmann is able to maintain a bright outlook on life and looks towards the future. Fibich, on the other hand, broods about the past.

Destined to be a haunter of libraries, Lewis's cautious progress through life reveals to him only his own shortcomings. Estranged from his wife and daughter, he searches for an alternative lifeline which comes from an unexpected quarter.

Elizabeth and Betsy were old school friends. When they meet again in their thirties, Elizabeth is relieving the boredom of her marriage with an affair, and Betsy has found romance in Paris. Are their lives really taking off at last, or are they both making mistakes?

From her first meeting with Martin Gibson, twenty nine year old Claire Pitt is immediately attracted to him. When Martin is widowed she is drawn deeper into his world but soon discovers that he is not quite everything she imagines him to be.

Dorothea May's tranquillity is shattered by the wedding arrangements for her grand-daughter, when she is asked to put up the bridegroom's feckless friend. As the wedding approaches, the scene is set for a highly charged conflict of generations.