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The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)

by L. P. Hartley (Author), Douglas Brooks-Davies (Introduction) "The eighth of July was a Sunday and on the following Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near Salisbury, for Brandham..." (more)
4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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  • This item: The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics) by L. P. Hartley

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    This item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions

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Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New edition (29 Jan 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141187786
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141187785
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 3,892 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy’s awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.
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First Sentence
The eighth of July was a Sunday and on the following Monday I left West Hatch, the village where we lived near Salisbury, for Brandham Hall. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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The Go-Between (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Wistful, chaste, and utterly captivating., 23 Sep 2005
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)   
Resembling both McEwan's Atonement and Frayn's Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent's naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence.

Leo's summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host's sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby. Catastrophe is inevitable--and devastating to Leo. In descriptive and nuanced prose, Hartley evokes the heat of summer and the emotional conflicts it heightens, the intensity rising along with the temperature. Magic spells, creatures of the zodiac, and mythology create an overlay of (chaste) paganism for Leo's perceptions, while widening the scope of Hartley's focus and providing innumerable parallels and symbols for the reader.

The emotional impact of the climax is tremendous, heightened by the author's use of three perspectives--Leo Colston as a man in his 60's, permanently damaged by events when he was 12; Leo as a 12-year-old, wrestling with new issues of class, social obligation, friendship, morality, and love, while inadvertently causing a disaster; and the reader himself, for whom hindsight and knowledge of history create powerful ironies as he views these events and the way of life they represent. Some readers have commented on Leo's unrealistic innocence in matters of sex, even as a 12-year-old, but this may be a function of age. For those of us who can remember life without TV and the computer, it is not so far-fetched to imagine a life in which "mass communication" meant the telegraph and in which "spooning" was an adults-only secret. Mary Whipple

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Perfection, 12 Jan 2006
From the moment you read the book's unforgettable opening sentence "The past is a foreign country:they do things differently there" you are in the hands of a master. In elegiac,wistful and perfectly controlled prose Hartley tells a story of lost innocence.The young Leo is delighted to be a guest at Brandham Hall, the awe-inspiring seat of the rich and worldly Maudsley family. But although apparently accepted and even feted by them, his reactions to the events around him ,based on his uncorrupted values,show that he is an outsider struggling to make sense of a complex world.Caught between the egotism of the lovers and the rigid and hypocritical values of the Maudsleys, Leo's heroes slowly disappoint his youthful hopes of winning their affection.
An extraordinary masterpiece of writing-often reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day -and an exploration of memory, Hartley shows in his final pages how differently people may perceive the past.
I must add that if you buy the book go for this edition as the introduction and notes are by far the best of those I have seen.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars L.P. Hartley - The Go-Between, 28 May 2008
By RachelWalker "RachelW" (England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
Amazing. My reading contains two strands: crime novels, peppered every four or five books with a piece of "proper" literature. Both types of book serve their purpose, but both offer a completely different kind of experience, and this is exemplified well by this book. Reading this was a completely, vastly, infinitely different kind of pleasure. I shan't hesitate in calling a masterpiece, as it is. A brilliant evocation of a young boy's catastrophic collision with an adult world he just cannot properly understand. His rationalisations of motives and feelings is conveyed brilliantly - and one is aware of a great sense of tragedy, rather than blame. the adults are not exactly to blame for the exploitation of the boy, for they fail to comprehend his own failure of comprehension.

everying is wrought perfectly: it's a beautiful, if inherently sad book. a book about class, love, society, naivety, nostalgia, and innocent youth. it's the definite cousin of ian mcewan's atonement, and deserves to be every bit as popular. (plus, it contains the most brilliant and tense description of a game of cricket that i have come across in literature (not that they're exactly ten-a-penny anyway, but oh well...), and i have no fondness for the game whatsoever.)

a must-read, this. an absolute classic.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A wistful look at youth and love
A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance - some similarity with McEwan's Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Nicholas Whyte

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic and charming
This was a delightfully engaging book about the recollections of a young boy embroiled in a scandalous liaison and his feelings on the matter. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Net

4.0 out of 5 stars Readable and intelligent
The Go Between is a fine novel that is beautifully written and carefully crafted. It can be read on several different levels, either as a coming of age drama and a lament for loss... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Charles

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