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. I found the narrator very naïve for a thirteen-year-old – at that age I was devouring Agatha Christie novels and I like to think I’d have worked out what was going on. However, otherwise Hartley has some acute observations about the way adults treat children, and each other. The coda, set two generations later, manages to be a satisfactory conclusion to the novel and yet shows that the story is not over (and perhaps never will be).