Anita Brookner is a novelist whose characters make themselves known primarily through the detailed description of their thought processes.  These are very British people whose passions remain largely unexpressed, who are not necessarily likeable, and whose lives may seem profoundly uneventful.  However, if one stops to contemplate the depth to which Brookner takes her characters, we see that their singularity is what brings the beauty to each of her novels.  I read all of her books, although to some they may be an acquired taste.
    In this novel, Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe are middle-aged sisters of very different temperaments, united by the reality of their very difficult family history.  Beatrice is a hopeless romantic, a musician who buries herself in romance novels and forever entertains the fantasy that such love is possible.  Miriam, a translator of French novels, fancies herself a realist.  Her five-year marriage to a prominent physicist was little more than an irritation, and whose present adulterous affair with a handsome music agent she recognizes as doomed even as it commences.
    The story's action revolves around Beatrice's failing health at an untimely point in her life.  Miriam is forced to take over more of her care, and it is her process of recognizing and accepting this fact that occupies much of her time, along with the cessation of her sexual affair with the music agent.  Miriam is profoundly unsentimental, and it is her honesty and self-examination, while at the same time allowing her sister her self-delusion to the end, that absorbs the reader.
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