In the Library
Parade's End
Ford Madox Ford, 1924
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 25 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 43
- Length
- Length 341k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Gentlemen don’t earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don’t do anything. They exist.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway does the same thing, but compresses the whole shattered postwar English psyche into a single June day in London.
£1.99
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front does the same thing, but from inside the trenches, stripping the war down to mud, noise, and dying friends.
£1.99
About the book
An Edwardian gentleman of the old school stands in a railway carriage opposite the wife who has set out to ruin him, watching the chalk downs of southern England slide past as a war he does not yet know about gathers across the Channel. Ford Madox Ford published this tetralogy across 1924 to 1928, drawing on his own service in the trenches and on the broken codes of the class he had been born into. Christopher Tietjens, statistician and Tory, a man whose honour has become a kind of comic affliction, loses his marriage, his career, and his country's idea of itself. Sylvia tortures, Valentine waits, the line breaks at the Somme. The old order does not fall in this novel; it is found, slowly, to have already fallen.