Quote:Colonel Macready thinks his bookish seventeen-year-old son Fergus is too soft, so he enlists the help of his manly chauffeur, Fred Carrington, to help whip the boy into shape. But the sweaty afternoons in the harness room above the garage take a turn the Colonel hadnt foreseen when Fergus and Freds boxing sessions lead first to friendship, and then to something more . . .

L. P. Hartley (1895-1972) is best known for his classics The Go-Between and Eustace and Hilda, as well as his supernatural stories, but The Harness Room (1971), the authors only explicitly gay-themed novel, reveals another side to this important 20th-century English writer.