Author(s): Anita Brookner

Fiction

At seventy-three Herz is facing an increasingly bewildering world. He cannot see his place in it or even work out what to do with his final years. Questions and misunderstandings haunt Herz like old ghosts. Should he travel, sell his flat, or propose marriage to an old friend he has not seen in thirty years? The letters he writes and does not send and the passers-by he encounters remind him how out of touch he is, how detached he is from the modern world. Yet, Herz believes that he must do some thing, only he doesn?t know what this next big thing in life should be ? Anita Brookner?s darkly comic, beautifully drawn and wonderfully sympathetic portrait of Herz reveals all the anxieties and consolations of old age in her most beguiling novel yet.