Latecomers was published by Jonathan Cape in 1988. Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich arrived in England together as children on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi Germany. They have been friends ever since — but their friendship is sustained by avoiding the subject that connects them most deeply: the catastrophe that brought them to England and the families they lost.
Hartmann has coped by becoming gregarious, successful, and resolutely cheerful — he has married an equally social woman, fathered children, built a business, and constructed a life of such emphatic normality that the past cannot penetrate it. Fibich has coped by becoming orderly, cautious, and emotionally contained — he has married a quiet woman, works as an accountant, and lives within routines that keep the world manageable and predictable.
The novel traces what happens when these defenses begin to fail. Fibich, in middle age, starts to feel the pull of the past he has suppressed: he needs to know what happened, to return to the places he left, to confront the grief he has spent a lifetime avoiding. Hartmann, confronted with Fibich’s need, must decide whether their friendship can accommodate the honesty that Fibich now requires.
Brookner, whose own parents were European Jewish refugees, writes about the Kindertransport experience with a restraint that is more moving than any display of emotion: the children’s bewilderment, the silence about what was happening, the English families who took them in but could not replace what was lost — all of this is present in the novel’s texture rather than stated in its prose.
Collecting Latecomers
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1988): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25