The Go-Between past that continues to exist in and to control the subconscious … This doubling of consciousness and of narrative voice—the innocent twelve-year-old's emerging from beneath the self-protective sixty-five-year-old's—is one of Hartley's most effective techniques.” Another preoccupation in Tóibín's introduction was how far the story of “The Go-Between” is based on fact, in the wake of Adrian Wright’s biographical study, "Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley". Although Leo is twelve at the time of the novel – the long, hot summer of 1900 – the five-year-old Hartley remembered that time afterwards as "a Golden Age". When he was about
The Space Between Us (novel) noted the social commentary present in the novel. "The Space Between Us" takes place in present-day India and centers on two women: Serabai (Sera) Dubash, an upper-middle-class, Parsi widow, and her domestic servant of more than twenty years, Bhima. Now sixty-five years old, illiterate Bhima lives in the slums of Mumbai with her pregnant, unwed granddaughter, the seventeen-year-old Maya, whose college tuition is paid for by Sera. Through flashbacks, Bhima remembers her husband, who, after a work-related accident caused him to lose three fingers, became an alcoholic and abandoned her, taking their son Amit with him. She also remembers her