Every August Anita Brookner ushers in the death of the year with a book steeped in dying, autumnal hues: slender, elegant books with tasteful jackets from the back of which stares a slender, elegant but also rather startled-looking author.

Anna Durrant, the heroine of Fraud, is a direct descendant of Brookner’s previous protagonists – pale, narrow-faced and angular (in this case actually anorexic), studiously well-dressed, virtually friendless, quietly depressed.

Anna, in short, is a tortoise, but this requires some explanation. Some eight books back, in Hotel du Lac, Brookner gave