Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Where has Brookner been for the last century?

While I have enjoyed many of her books, this was astonishingly poorly written and sappy. She cannot decide which of her unattractive, uninteresting, self-absorbed characters to concentrate on. She is writing about modern people in present-day England, but it may as well be Victorian times; the notion that passionate sex (not true passion) will be punished through the death of the innocent (though obnoxious) spouse of the main character and their unborn child. It all has been done before--long, long before, when it would have fit the age--and much more competently. I will be wary of my next book by Ms. Brookner.