The Go-Between

This book is set in the scorching hot summer of 1900, often noted by young people of the time as a moment of hope, peace, and infinite possibility. They didn’t know what was coming for them. Neither does Hartley’s narrator, a fatherless 12-year-old boy spending his summer holiday with the wealthy family of a school friend.

I loved the imagery in the book: a stolen afternoon of coed swimming in a sky-blue river; a village cricket game that exposes both class tension and a forbidden romance; a green summer suit with smoked-pearl buttons that makes a boy suddenly conscious of… show more.

I read this book for the second time in thirty-five years and have seen the original film based on it at least three times. The novel does a great job of portraying the situation of a boy visiting the country estate of a classmate whose family is in a higher social class.

The book has a successful narrative design of frame narration and first-person narrator. It achieves a great portrayal of human motivations and the lasting effects that self-serving people have on the people they impress.

As with The Portrait of a Lady, I wanted to re-read a novel to… show more.

The Go-Between is a haunting, doom-laden book about a naïve boy – Leo – out of his depth when staying with a socially smarter friend in a British country house. It’s set in the heatwave summer of 1911 and made such a big impression on me that I wrote a novel of my own set in that summer. The first line of The Go-Between is famous: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Cue the dissolve into an Edwardian dreamworld that slowly turns nightmarish.