Book summary

This portrait of a Jewish family in London between the two world wars is more exuberant and less inner-directed than most of her novels, and more involved with world and its inevitable conflicts between parents and children, self and society, work and personal life.

Media reviews

"Miss Brookner seems to be making a bid to open out her canvas: Her subject is not one waif-like woman, but an entire family; her focus, not simply the consequences of romantic love, but also the effects of the enduring, changing bonds between parents and their children, sisters and their brothers. Writing in careful, angled prose, Miss Brookner conjures up the vanished world that a distinguished European family inhabited in London....Miss Brookner puts a little spin on these tales, foiling some of the reader's more obvious expectations, and her storytelling abilities are so assured, so graceful, that we're drawn, eagerly, along. At the same time, however, we're apt to chafe at her italicized applications of Freudian logic--for instance, practically every male character's exchange with a woman is defined in terms of his relationship with his mother--and at her unremittingly cynical view of society."