Product Description
• The first stand-alone digital edition of The Last Post, Volume 4 in the Parade’s End tetralogy
• Edited and corrected text
• Accompanied by a brief Note on the Text, embedded explanatory notes and Links to Further Reading
Parade’s End is Ford Madox Ford’s celebrated four-novel sequence tracing the trauma of the First World War through the experiences of Christopher Tietjens. Tietjens, a brilliant civil servant from a wealthy Yorkshire land-owning background, is troubled by the reckless infidelities of his wife, Sylvia, and his own feelings for Valentine Wannop, a suffragette. On the Western Front in northern France, he finds himself under fire from the enemy and under pressure in his private life. Tietjens and Valentine are finally reunited in London on Armistice Day. In The Last Post we find them living together in the countryside a few years after the end of the war when Sylvia suddenly turns up, intent on revenge.
The 2012 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End features Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of Christopher Tietjens.
The four volumes comprising Parade’s End are: (1.) Some Do Not . . .; (2.) No More Parades; (3.) A Man Could Stand Up—; (4.) The Last Post
• Parade’s End is also available from Swift Editions as a single-volume Kindle ebook comprising all four novels in the series
EXTRACT
“The girl had begun to cry. She had said that it was dreadful. But you could not object. It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead. You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you mad. The Dead ought to have all they could get.”
REVIEWS OF PARADE’S END
“There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.” – W. H. Auden
“The best novel by a British writer . . . It is also the finest novel about the First World War” – Anthony Burgess
“The finest English novel about the Great War” – Malcolm Bradbury, Guardian
“If Parade’s End is due for a revival it’s not for its large historical or philosophical truths but because it is panoramic and beautifully written. It is a condemnation of the brutal senselessness and stupid waste of war.” – Edmund White, New York Review of Books
“Together [the four novels] constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time . . . They are written in a style that must be the envy of every thinking man. The pleasure in them is infinite.” – William Carlos Williams
“In the greatest war novel of the 20th century, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, the First World War destroys both a man and a civilisation.” – Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
“I'd love to find the time to reread Ford Madox Ford’s Parade's End – possibly the greatest 20th-century novel in English, I've come to think.” – John Gray, New Statesman
“I started reading it and pretty damn quickly I really wanted the job. It’s a tremendously unputdownable book.” – Tom Stoppard, screenwriter of the 2012 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) was a novelist and editor who published over eighty books, both fiction and non-fiction. Apart from Parade’s End, he is mainly remembered for The Good Soldier (1915).
ABOUT SWIFT EDITIONS
Swift Editions aims to revive neglected classic texts as digital editions, produced to as high a professional standard as the best printed books.
• Edited and corrected text
• Accompanied by a brief Note on the Text, embedded explanatory notes and Links to Further Reading
Parade’s End is Ford Madox Ford’s celebrated four-novel sequence tracing the trauma of the First World War through the experiences of Christopher Tietjens. Tietjens, a brilliant civil servant from a wealthy Yorkshire land-owning background, is troubled by the reckless infidelities of his wife, Sylvia, and his own feelings for Valentine Wannop, a suffragette. On the Western Front in northern France, he finds himself under fire from the enemy and under pressure in his private life. Tietjens and Valentine are finally reunited in London on Armistice Day. In The Last Post we find them living together in the countryside a few years after the end of the war when Sylvia suddenly turns up, intent on revenge.
The 2012 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End features Benedict Cumberbatch in the role of Christopher Tietjens.
The four volumes comprising Parade’s End are: (1.) Some Do Not . . .; (2.) No More Parades; (3.) A Man Could Stand Up—; (4.) The Last Post
• Parade’s End is also available from Swift Editions as a single-volume Kindle ebook comprising all four novels in the series
EXTRACT
“The girl had begun to cry. She had said that it was dreadful. But you could not object. It was the Last Post they were playing. For the Dead. You could not object to their playing the Last Post for the Dead that night. Even if it was a drunken man who played and even if it drove you mad. The Dead ought to have all they could get.”
REVIEWS OF PARADE’S END
“There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.” – W. H. Auden
“The best novel by a British writer . . . It is also the finest novel about the First World War” – Anthony Burgess
“The finest English novel about the Great War” – Malcolm Bradbury, Guardian
“If Parade’s End is due for a revival it’s not for its large historical or philosophical truths but because it is panoramic and beautifully written. It is a condemnation of the brutal senselessness and stupid waste of war.” – Edmund White, New York Review of Books
“Together [the four novels] constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time . . . They are written in a style that must be the envy of every thinking man. The pleasure in them is infinite.” – William Carlos Williams
“In the greatest war novel of the 20th century, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, the First World War destroys both a man and a civilisation.” – Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
“I'd love to find the time to reread Ford Madox Ford’s Parade's End – possibly the greatest 20th-century novel in English, I've come to think.” – John Gray, New Statesman
“I started reading it and pretty damn quickly I really wanted the job. It’s a tremendously unputdownable book.” – Tom Stoppard, screenwriter of the 2012 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) was a novelist and editor who published over eighty books, both fiction and non-fiction. Apart from Parade’s End, he is mainly remembered for The Good Soldier (1915).
ABOUT SWIFT EDITIONS
Swift Editions aims to revive neglected classic texts as digital editions, produced to as high a professional standard as the best printed books.
