The Go-Between
An old man unlocks a diary he kept in 1900 and returns to the July he spent as a schoolfellow's guest at a Norfolk country house, where the daughter of the family and a tenant farmer set him carrying messages between them through a record heatwave. He is twelve, flattered by the errand, and understands about half of what passes through his hands. Hartley's opening line, 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there', is among the most quoted in English fiction, and the book took the Heinemann Foundation Prize.
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- 55% · 10 shared