A perfect gem of a book. Mrs. Palfrey, the latest resident of a mid-tier hotel where the elderly live out their final, quasi-independent years, is lonely and despairing of her new life. By chance, she meets a young, aspiring writer, who agrees to pretend to be her absent, never-visiting grandson to show off to the other residents. Though there are numerous comic scenes, the throughline of this book is the anxiety the formerly-on-top-of-the-world Brits feel of decolonization in general and of senescence in the specific. The residents complain about hearing Commonwealth accents on the news, about the student demonstrations they see depicted, and the loss of control they feel. A social-political novel wrapped inside a story about four residents at a hotel.

"For her part, only when she had been abroad, had she consciously thought, 'I am English.' she had kept that barrier up, she proudly remembered now...It had been her solace for homesickness, her defiance from fear, her affirmation of her origins. When she was young, it had seemed that nearly all
the world was pink on her school atlas — 'ours', in fact. Nearly all ours! she had thought. Pink was the colour, and the word, of well-being, and of optimism."

Taylor gently skewers fondness for empire and its trappings while telling a tender story about the end of life. I'm glad that the introduction to this NYRB edition pointed out some of the undercurrents of the novel concerning 1970s England that I would have missed otherwise! And kudos to NYRB for surfacing writers who I would never otherwise have heard of. I have only had one or two misses with NYRB and can't wait to read more Taylor (I have a collection of short stories somewhere)