Old Filth - (Old Filth Trilogy) by Jane Gardam (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"A masterpiece of storytelling."--The Dallas Morning News

Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.

"An extraordinary novel--the structure, the characters, the sweep of time."--Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake

Review Quotes

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

The New York Times Book Review - The Washington Post - The San Francisco Chronicle - New York Magazine - The Globe & Mail - Slate

"This is the rare novel that drives its readers forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style. One must savor every phrase." --The Guardian

"Gardam is an exquisite storyteller. Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful, and haunting."--The Seattle Times

"Splendid . . . Jane Gardam's style is perfect." --The New York Times Book Review

"I don't know why Gardam isn't universally celebrated and beloved. Her prose is dazzling, and she writes with a kind of subdued but wicked humor that takes a moment to clamp down on you."--Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

"A magnificent creation . . . an almost unbearably poignant document of isolation and retreat."--The Sunday Times

"Jane Gardam's beautiful, vivid, defiantly funny novel is a must."--The Times

"I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, 'She can't do that!, ' open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works."--Denise Mina, author of The Long Drop

"Jane Gardam is one of our finest novelists. . . Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of how we lived then and live now and for its absolute mastery of authorial tone. It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel; don't miss it!"--The New Statesman

"From the dusty opening to its quietly eloquent resolution this novel is a sustained tour de force of the novelist's craft, wit and intelligence. Utterly compelling." --The Observer

"A magnificent, deeply moving and compassionate portrait of an era and a sentimental education." --The Daily Mail

"Gardam's superb new novel is surely her masterpiece . . . one of the most moving fictions I have read in years."--Time Out

"[Jane Gardam is] the best contemporary British writer you probably haven't heard of."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR