Anita Brookner

Edith Hope, a successful mature novelist, has made a fool of herself over love and is sent by her friends to a Swiss hotel to come to her senses. Instead of writing a new romance novel, she finds herself preoccupied with her fellow guests.

Fearful of emulating her isolated and timid widowed mother, Emma Roberts, herself circumspect, repressed, and brooding, leaves London for Paris to pursue her study of classical garden design. Emma is trying to live "according to the classical ideal, that of order and control and self-mastery," the very life that Brookner has so assiduously examined in each of her subtly powerful psychological novels, which now number 23. Brookner's melancholy but...