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Surely, by now, no one picks up a new Brookner novel expecting easy uplift or excitement - and her 20th is very, well, Brooknerish. The narrator is a middle-class woman of middling talents. At the start of the novel she expects no great things from life - and at the end of it, after two not very satisfactory relationships with older men, and two deaths in the family, she expects less. And yet on a small canvas and with a predictably limited palette, Brookner is able to portray an altered life in a way which is both convincing and compelling. Set between Nice and London, it concerns the narrator's attempts to come to terms with her widowed mother's marriage to an older and seemingly wealthy man - and with the tragic fallout from his sudden illness. London and Nice are cleverly refracted through the eyes of the narrator; the relationship between the two women is movingly done; their financial vulnerability is resonantly explored, without overstatement. And as is usual with Brookner, there is more real substance and interest in these distinguished 200 pages than in many a longer and more lurid fiction.