Latecomers

''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