Two couples meet at a German spa and become, to all appearances, the dearest of friends. What follows, told by the most unreliable of narrators, is a story of adultery, madness, and suicide concealed beneath the immaculate surface of Edwardian propriety. Ford Madox Ford's 1915 novel perfected a method of shattered chronology, its narrator circling and revising, confessing and concealing, until the reader understands the real subject is not what happened but what it means to fail at knowing another person. John Dowell tells his tale with the baffled courtesy of a man who missed everything. It remains one of the most technically accomplished novels in English, a tragedy narrated by someone who never quite grasps that it is one.