That Chemist

He had been immersed in a reverie ... He had been back in the old house, although this time the house had a wider context, was grounded in the neighbourhood of his childhood ... a greengrocer, a chemist...

Strangers (2009), Ch. 6

I go back in my mind to all the rooms I have slept in, remember in detail the streets of my earliest perambulations: that chemist on the corner...

'At the Hairdresser's' (2011), Ch. 2

These two final fictions share details and themes. This is true of other contiguous novels in the Brookner canon, but Strangers is separated by four years from its predecessor, an unprecedented gap; such isolation gives Strangers and 'At the Hairdresser's' a special affinity with one another.