Strangers

Nothing less than brilliant, often highly amusing and, ultimately life affirming

Sunday 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, Guardian

The beauty and precision of Brookner's writing is rightly praised each time she publishes a novel, but what is less often remarked on is her daring . . . like Graham Greene, she draws the reader into a world that has a character and signature all of its own . . . Strangers is a novel of sober brilliance, and the unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist

Helen Dunmore, The Times

No one writes with more skill and honesty about the human condition and this book is possibly her finest

Julie Myerson, Observer Books of the Year

A novel of great stylistic beauty and psychological truth . . . the pitiless depiction of the final stages of life - and the refusal to allow her characters any consolation - makes Strangers as great a reflection on fear and regret as Philip Larkin's poem Aubade or Beckett's Endgame

Mark Lawson, Guardian

In the hands of a lesser novelist, her stories of human frailty would be depressing, but she manages to make them sparkle with life - and always with hope . . . consistently absorbing

Daily Telegraph

Paul Sturgis is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect . . . a brisk and moving story

Spectator