The Go-between, by L.P. Hartley (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

Hartley's novel was made into a good film by Joe Losey, but the film is nothing as good as the book. It rereads superbly (though the last chapter is a bad misjudgment artistically) and must surely be one of the finest English novels of the last half-century, existing on several layers of meaning. Set in the last year of the 19th century and the last also of Victoria's reign, it evokes the end of a Golden Age with great nostalgia, but the limpid, idyllic ambience turns into adultery and violent death (by suicide). The drama is witnessed at first hand by a 14year-old schoolboy, Leo Colston, whose emotional life never recovers; and at the end, now a man in his sixties and unmarried, he is driven to revisit the crucial scene of his past.