If you know Brookner's work, you know what to expect: lonely, disappointed people leading materially comfortable but somehow diminished or uneventful lives.

This novel features a male central character and unlike many Brookner novels this one has a 'wow!' moment. After the double tragedy in Alan's life I had to put the book down, a little breathless. For this is a deeply sad story of a man beguiled by Sarah, a woman not so much cruel as neglectful, who is indifferent to Alan and the effect she has on him. Alan finds himself steered into marriage with Angela, unsuitable in very different ways, a rather prim young woman with a wholly unrealistic and virginal idea of marriage. Frightened of men, her romantic fantasy soon turns sour.

When she is unhappily six months pregnant, Alan searches the wet streets of Paris for the ever-elusive Sarah. Whilst he's away, planning an infidelity that never happens, he learns that his wife has lost their baby.

After the death of the wife he never loved, Alan's life is to all intents and purposes over - he knows it, accepts it, almost revels in his own perceived dullness. The novel up to this point is uncharacteristically fizzy. The second part of the novel is much slower, reflecting the change in Alan.

Brookner's central characters are always lonely. Alan's tragedy is ordinary enough in some ways, yet never banal. I'm sometimes irritated with the self-indulgence of many of Brookner's characters. But for Alan's plight - his guilt, the waste of it all - I simply felt profoundly sad. [May 2005]

Another fine piece from Anita Brookner. Few writers have her ability to dissect emotions, feelings, and relationships. She plumbs the depths and squeezes every nuance, every consideration and angle out of the most trivial of observations or incidents. And she does so with such a clear style, such pellucid writing, that you are swept up in the unfolding, and often unravelling, of lives.

This is the story of Alan Sherwood, a respected, conservative English solicitor who once steps outside of his persona to have a passionate affair with a woman who has never, in her entire life, given one iota of thought for the concerns or wishes of another. It goes badly because Alan does not know what he is dealing with, and he keeps trying to put Sarah into a box that is within his understanding; his inability to see the impossibility of doing that is what leads him into unrequited obsession and then into a disastrous marriage with a woman who was Sarah's friend, as much as anyone could be Sarah's friend. In a sense Alan pays for his folly with a lonely that he seems resigned to, but in which there will always be a sense of loss, a sense of missed opportunities, and squandered chances, all because he could not see that the box did not exist.