“The past is another country: everything is different there.” After half a century, the aging bachelor gentleman Lionel Colston recalls the nineteen days that he spent as a twelve-year-old boy in July 1900 with the relatives of his school friend on the Brandham Hall estate, where he arrived full of bright hopes and from where he returned with a mental trauma that crippled his entire future life. life. An accidentally discovered diary from that distant time helps the hero to restore and relive the sweet and bitter experience he acquired then; in fact, the diary is the fabric of the narrative, however, with a foreword and an afterword, as well as digressions, amendments, comments and self-assessments of an adult who outlived the then naive and enthusiastic teenager by half a century.

(from the preface to book B . Skorodenko)