[issybird]

I've been bouncing around among several options and have finally decided to go with The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley. Even those who haven't read it will know its famous opening line, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." People may also have seen the film with Julie Christie and Alan Bates; I wasn't aware of a 2015 BBC production until I started looking at links.

I'm going to borrow bits from Goodreads and Wikipedia, as I think both are a little too revealing.

Summering with a fellow schoolboy on a great English estate, Leo, the hero of L. P. Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. . . . The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart.

The book gives a critical view of society at the end of the Victorian era through the eyes of a naïve schoolboy outsider.

In the book’s prologue, Leo Colston chances upon a diary from 1900, the year of his thirteenth birthday, and gradually pieces together a memory that he has suppressed. Under its influence, and from the viewpoint of what he has become by the midpoint of “this hideous century”, Leo relives the events of what had once seemed to him its hopeful beginning.

The price is slightly outside our US parameter, but cheaper in the UK and Canada and available on OverDrive and Audible. I also figure it's readily available in print for those who don't mind that.

Amazon US $10.99 | Amazon UK £4.99 | Amazon CA $10.99 | Amazon AU $14.99

344 pp.