In the Library
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford, 1915
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 19
- Length
- Length 75k 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.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
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
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald tells the same story of a narrator who misunderstands everything, and the revelation is just as shattering.
£1.99
Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Laclos stages the same destruction caused by people who perform their emotions instead of feeling them.
£1.99
About the book
"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." So John Dowell begins, and the strangeness takes a moment to land: he was there for all of it, the sadness is largely his own, and he is the one person who still cannot see it. Across nine years of taking the waters at a German spa, two couples keep a flawless picture of Edwardian decency while Florence Dowell carries on an affair with Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier of the title, a man whose honour answers to every code the world can see and none that it cannot. Leonora, Edward's wife, has known the whole time. Dowell, telling it backward from the rubble of all four lives, will not quite let himself know even now. To read him is to feel his most soothing sentences as the ones burying the most, and to do the work he refuses, assembling from each calm digression a ruin that was always in plain sight. The saddest story is the one he cannot bear to finish hearing.