Synopsis
Step into a finely observed world of dinner-table talk, music, and quiet yearnings. A novel built from intimate diaries and letters, Passing By follows a group of socialite friends and officials as they navigate love, duty, and the tangled currents of early 20th‑century life. The book’s pages unfold through personal notes, private thoughts, and spirited conversations that reveal character, mood, and motive without losing the social texture of the era.
Through the voices of office clerks, hosts, and visitors, this edition explores how art, religion, and ambition intersect with daily life. Readers glimpse a culture where music fills rooms, art changes hands, and personal choices ripple through careers and friendships. The tone blends wit, seriousness, and a touch of irony as its figures contemplate friendship, romance, and the costs of public duty.
What you’ll experience:
- Intimate glimpses into a social circle via diaries and letters that reveal relationships, politics, and cultural life.
- Rich vignettes of music, galleries, and dinner conversations that illuminate the era’s tastes and tensions.
- Subtle moral debates on faith, vocation, and the difficult decisions people face.
- A carefully drawn cast whose private thoughts contrast with public roles.
Ideal for readers who enjoy historical fiction told through personal voices, vivid social detail, and thoughtful, character-driven storytelling.
Passing By offers a window into a world where every exchange—whether a joke at a salon or a grave letter from a confidant—moves the story forward and deepens the mystery of its characters’ choices.
About the Author
Born in London in 1874, Maurice Baring was a man of letters, a scion of a family long prominent in the financial ventures of the British Empire. The son of the 1st Baron Revelstoke (a director of the Bank of England and a senior partner at Baring Bros.) he was educated at Eton and at Cambridge, and joined the diplomatic service in 1898. In 1904 he became a journalist and reported the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited with having discovered Chekov's work in Moscow and helping to introduce it to the West. Baring is remembered as a versatile, prolific and highly successful writer, who produced articles, plays, biographies, criticism, poetry, translations, stories and novels. He is regarded as a representative of the social culture that flourished in England before World War I, his work highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time.
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