By Anita Brookner. IN her 17th novel, Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner, master of nuance and perception, explores the generation gap.
Visitors examines what happens when a childless widow confronts the arrogance of youth.
The reader doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. At 70 she enjoys her books, her memories, tea in the garden of her London flat. Her deceased husband's married cousins, Kitty and Austin, keep in touch in order to issue ritual medical bulletins. Strangers, introduced to her for the first time, assumed that Thea had never married, thinking her self-sufficience no more than the sum of others' indifference. As a widow she cut a poor figure, she knew.