Parades End, Ford Madox Ford
Parades End, Ford Madox Ford
2 Rating(s)
List: $39.95 | Sale: $27.97
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Parade's End

Author: Ford Madox Ford

Narrator: Steven Crossley

Unabridged: 38 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/07/2012


Synopsis

Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy set in England during World War I is widely considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century.
     First published as four separate novels (Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post) between 1924 and 1928, Parade’s End explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war.
     Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine. A profound portrait of one man’s internal struggles during a time of brutal world conflict, Parade’s End bears out Graham Greene’s prediction that “there is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.”

About Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in England in 1873. In 1919 He changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in honor of his grandfather, the pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, whose biography he had written. Ford was well known for both his fiction and his criticism. He founded two influential journals, The English Review in 1908 and The Transatlantic Review in 1924, in which he championed many of the leading modernist writers of the day. His most famous novels include the tetralogy Parade’s End and The Good Soldier, which are still ranked among the greatest works of the twentieth century. Ford died in 1939, at age sixty-five, in France.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Violet

I was expecting a masterpiece; what I got was a neurotic obese windbag of a novel. VS Pritchett, always an astute critic, remarked that confusion was always Ford’s mainspring as a novelist. This novel is so hysterically confused it reads like a diary of someone chronicling his own nervous breakdown.......more

Well, this is where the 2012 BBC mini series is actually better than the book. I found the book a bit "stodgy" and dull, and I wasn't convinced that "the old ways" were really worth preserving, if it ended up causing so much unnecessary grief and heart ache. Benedict Cumberbatch, Adelaide Clemens an......more

Goodreads review by Judy

I decided to start reading this great First World War novel after seeing the start of the BBC adaptation, but then became caught up by the book and fell behind with watching the TV version. It's a hard book to describe, the tale of an upper-class English family falling apart in and around the war. I......more