L.P. Hartley (1895–1972), the son of the director of a
brickworks, attended Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, before
setting out on a career as a literary critic and writer of short
stories. In 1944 he published his first novel, The Shrimp and the
Anemone, the opening volume of the trilogy Eustace and Hilda. In
the spring of 1952, Hartley began The Go-Between, a novel strongly
rooted in his childhood. By October he had already completed the
first draft, and the finished product was published in early 1953.
The Go-Between became an immediate critical and popular success and
has long been considered Hartley’s finest book. His many other
novels include Facial Justice, The Hireling, and The
Love-Adept.
Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The
Master (a novel based on the life of Henry James) and Brooklyn, and
two collections of stories, Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family.
He has been a visiting writer at Stanford, the University of Texas
at Austin, and Princeton, and is now Mellon Professor in the
Humanities at Columbia University.
"Exuding such a sense of summer the pages might be warm to touch,
Hartley's coming-of-age tale is set during the heatwave of 1900. It
all ends in tears, but not before there have been plenty of
cucumber sandwiches on the lawn." —The Observer
"The first time I read it, it cleared a haunting little spot in my
memory, sort of like an embassy to my own foreign country. . . . I
don't want to spoil the suspense of a well-made plot, because you
must read this, but let's just say it goes really badly and the
messenger (shockingly) gets blamed. Or he blames himself anyway.
And here the mirror cracks; the boy who leaves Brandham is not the
one who came. Indeed the narrator converses with his old self as
though he were two people. That was the powerful gonging left by my
first read: What, if anything, bundles us through time into a
single person?" —Ann Brashares, "All Things
Considered," NPR
"I can't stop recommending to anyone in earshot L.P. Hartley's The
Go-Between. . . . One of the fabled opening lines in modern
literature: 'The past is a foreign country: They do things
differently there.' The NYRB paperback has a superb new
introduction by Colm Tóibín, but don't read it until after you've
read the book itself." —Frank Rich, New York Magazine
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