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The Go-Between (1953) by L. P. Hartley
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Leo Colston is rifling through old papers when he stumbles across a journal he kept as a schoolboy, in the year 1900. The pages of mundane information are enough to remind him of the summer he spent with his school friend Marcus at the Maudsley Country Estate.
A young Leo gets swept away in a world where he meets Lords and has his crumpled clothes are picked up by servants. His naivety is pounced upon by Maudsley daughter and a local farmer as they embark on a forbidden love affair. This is a richly layered story about past and present, knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart.
This book was recently discussed by Kate Camp and Kim Hill on National's Saturday programme and it’s worth looking up the podcast. With touches of The Secret History and Stoner - this one of the best books I've read this year.
In the late nineties, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City to take a job as the assistant to the literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in a wooden office full Dictaphones and typewriters and old-time agents and in the evening she goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment.
Given the great task of answering Salinger’s mountainous pile fan mail, Rakoff is moved by the touching and heart wrenching letters from his readers. She chooses to abandon the decade old standard template response and starts replying. Over the course of the year, she finds her own voice by acting as Salinger’s, on her own dangerous and liberating terms.
Set in the nineties, but in a feeling of the sixties, My Salinger Year is a great tribute to one of the world’s most beloved, yet private writers.
After the success of The Watchtower (1966), Australian author Elizabeth Harrower withdrew her last book, In Certain Circles before publication in 1971.
Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother Russell, introduces her to his comrade from the war, Stephen and his sister Anna. Having had lived a privileged and sheltered life, Zoe is completely mystified when meeting these orphaned siblings, “You only think of orphans in fairy tales…wandering in, hand in hand out of the woods all misty and neglected and bedraggled.”
Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they may come from different social words but all four will spend their lives moving in and out of each other’s shadow.
In a similar vein to Stoner and Mrs. Bridge, this long lost novel is a welcome and relevant addition to our Time Out favourites. In Certain Circles holds its own today as an intense family drama about family and love, tyranny and freedom.
This is the true story of Nathan Penlington, a poet, performer and writer. He is also a self confessed obsessive and when the opportunity to purchase one of his obsessions - a set of the first 106 volumes of Choose Your Own Adventure – on ebay, he bought them immediately. Upon receiving the series, he notices each one is marked with the signature of the original owner, Terence John Prendergast.
Settling in to relive his childhood nostalgia, Terrence’s scrawled handwriting follows Nathan as he reads – jokes, annotations and notes are scribbled in the margins. Then, a heartbreaking message is found amongst some loose bits of paper.
Left school with intention to kill myself
Nathan needs to find the truth about Terence’s entries. This child, growing up in the 1980s, who was lonely, unhappy, with no self esteem. Is he twenty years too late? Who is the boy in the book? Is he even still alive?
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