Anita Brookner ended her writing career with the absolute glorious At the Hairdressers, the only short story she wrote and which has never been published in print but is only available in ebook format.

It feels to me that Brookner put her love of writing, her talent, and all the topics she addressed over and over again in her novels and compressed them into this short story. Her compassion for her main protagonist, the typical lonely Brookner woman which she herself probably was too, shines through in every sentence she dedicates to her, who is in this story an 80 years old woman. The protagonist sheds all her bitterness, her frustration and unhappiness and Brookner pulls her one more time into the spotlight which is this time not dim and grey, but golden.

And finally! The Brookner woman finds redemption and finds it in herself to step out of her discomfort, propelled forward by the most unlikely character you would have expected.

Beautiful and cathartic, this final gift from Anita Brookner to her readers and I feel, to herself.

Good grief, I have a real knack for choosing stories that don't help my current spirits. In this evocative but unremittingly sad story, we meet eighty-year-old Beth, who lives in defiant independent in a basement flat near Victoria. Her solitary state is partly a matter of choice: she asserts, with a prickle, 'I am not lonely except in company.' And yet there's a smack of wishful thinking behind those words. With a broken marriage behind her, without children and with no close friends or neighbours, Beth passes her days with a strict schedule of books and visits to the local hairdresser's, where she finds a measure of company and liveliness. But one morning she wakes having had a dream of her two girlhood friends, which causes her to revisit her past and her present situation.

When Beth is caught in the rain at the hairdresser's, one of the girls introduces her to Chris, who runs a car service for elderly ladies. His brightness, youth and enthusiasm bewitch Beth, who discovers that her heart hasn't yet entirely withered away. This cheerful young man becomes an answer to the yawning void in her life. But do we run the risk of building castles in the air around charming people who appear suddenly in our lives? Can such idealism be sustained? For all her assertions of satisfaction, Beth's loneliness is so vividly present that it's almost another character, darkly clawing at the corners of the page, and when events cast a new light on her new friend Chris, she is finally nudged into wondering whether it's time to make a stand and change her life. Deeply moving as a picture of isolated old age, tragic, and enough to make one start casting worried glances in the mirror. And yet, the story is so affecting precisely because Brookner is so clever, insightful and articulate. ( )