Parade's End (Wordsworth Classics) - Softcover

Ford, Ford Madox

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840227192 ISBN 13: 9781840227192

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 2013

Synopsis

Parade's End is the great British war novel and Ford Madox Ford's major achievement as a novelist. Originally published as four linked novels between 1924 and 1928, it follows the story of Christopher Tietjens, as his life is shattered by his wife's infidelities and overturned by the mud, blood and destruction of the First World War. Tietjens, with his old-fashioned Tory values, is already out of step with the corrupt political culture of Edwardian England: his experiences at the Front and his developing relationship with the suffragette Valentine Wannop force him into a radical reconfiguring of his values as he participates in the post-war period of national re-construction. Parade's End is both a subtly perceptive psychological novel and a richly descriptive chronicle of 'the public events of a decade'. Through Tietjens, his beautiful (and unforgettably cruel) wife, Sylvia, and the principled Valentine, Ford draws us into the world of the English upper class as it goes through a period of crisis and transformation.

About this title

Review:

'the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned by the clever devices of a jealous and lying wife' Graham Greene '[Ford] was the only Englishman who stood alongside the great 'moderns' - Joyce, Eliot and Pound' Peter Ackroyd 'Of the various demands one can make of the novelist, that he show us the way in which a society works, that he show an understanding of the human heart, that he create characters whose reality we believe and for whose fate we care, that he describe things and people so that we feel their physical presence, that he illuminate our moral consciousness, that he make us laugh and cry, that he delight us by his craftsmanship, there is not one, it seems to me, that Ford does not completely satisfy. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.' --W.H.Auden, 1961

Book Description:

A masterpiece of wartime writing by one of the most esteemed novelists of the twentieth century

About this edition

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1840227192
• ISBN 13: 9781840227192
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 768