The Go-Between
Leo Colston, a retired Englishman in his sixties, opens a diary from the trunk of his childhood and returns in memory to the summer of 1900 he spent at Brandham Hall, the Norfolk country house belonging to the wealthy family of his school friend. As an outsider middle-class boy in an aristocratic house, Leo gets recruited as a go-between carrying secret notes between Marian, the daughter of the family engaged to a viscount, and Ted Burgess, the tenant farmer she could not be seen with. Hartley moves between the elderly Leo's reckoning and the heatwave-summer chronicle of a child who carried the affair until it broke open and broke him.
What you might want to know about The Go-Between
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An English man in his sixties revisits the summer of 1900 he spent carrying secret notes between an aristocratic daughter and a tenant farmer in L.P. Hartley's classic.
The Go-Between was written by L.P. Hartley and published in 1953. The novel famously opens with the line: The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Yes. A 1971 film adaptation directed by Joseph Losey, with screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A 2015 BBC TV film also exists.
The Go-Between is 2 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Go-Between takes most readers under an hour to finish.
The Go-Between is a standalone novel by L.P. Hartley, not part of a series.
The Go-Between is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.