Incidents in the Rue Laugier, by Anita Brookner (Penguin, £5.99 in UK)

Personally I find each Anita Brookner novel very like the last one, and like the next, as well, but there is a public mainly women, I suspect, though including many critics as well which regards her as sensitive and insightful and a. novelist of stature. This story of a quartet of English visitors in France moves inside a certain emotional world of adultery, self analysis, familial tensions, and a conversational tone, of blase self sufficiency particularly on the part of the male characters. Critics have praised it, Brookner admirers no doubt will read it with enjoyment, but I found the dramatis personae vapid and uninteresting and the story itself faintly predictable, in spite of the ultra professional gloss.