‘She has never written a better novel’ Ruth Rendell‘Quietly commanding’ Hilary Mantel'No man is free of his own history' Hartmann and Fibich came to England on the Kindertransport: orphans of the war, and strangers in a strange land. Together, they survived. Now, in adulthood, they have been unable to separate. They share a successful business, but they are also bound by the shaky foundations of their own pasts. Hartmann’s carefully polished manners conceal the past he refuses to think about, while Fibich, a mass of fears and neuroses, can do nothing but remember.Their friendship steers them through the decades, as they become husbands, fathers, men. And then comes the day when Fibich must make the journey back to Berlin, to the railway station where he last saw his mother . . .‘One of the warmest of her novels, rich with family affection, shadowed by history’ Tessa Hadley‘The last great novelist of the twentieth century’ Daily Telegraph‘Each book is a prayer bead on a string, and each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer and a protest and a charm against encroaching night’ Hilary Mantel, praise for Anita Brookner