This Booker Winner from 1984 has just reminded me of how much I admire and relish Anita Brookner's gifted prose. Clean, cool, assured and at times acerbic writing. The setting and characters are effortlessly and mercilessly rendered in all their full excruciating glory. The mountain and the lake cast the perfect mercurial backdrop of haze and mystery with their slow changing patterns of light and grey reflecting the pall that seems to surround the central character Edith Hope with a debilitating and almost anesthetic, albeit self consciously aware sense of sadness. Loved this. Love Anita Brookner.