The Man in the Wooden Hat - (Old Filth Trilogy) by Jane Gardam (Paperback)

About the Book

A portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50-year union of two remarkable people, "The Man in the Wooden Hat" is fiction of a very high order from the author of "Old Filth."

Book Synopsis

"The Man in the Wooden Hat is funny and affecting...It's remarkable." The New York Times Book Review

Sir Edward Feathers and Betty meet in Hong Kong after the Second World War. Betty has spent the war in a Japanese internment camp; Feathers, a "Raj orphan," is a successful barrister known by the moniker Filth-Failed in London Try Hong Kong-who is in want of an English wife but lacking in romantic aptitude.

The New York Times called Feathers one of the most memorable char-acters in modern literature. Old Filth was Edward's story. In The Man in the Wooden Hat, the story of his marriage is told from the point of view of Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. In this second book of remarkable trilogy, an intriguing backstory becomes a full-blooded novel that rivals its beloved predecessor and gives as fine a portrait of a decades-long marriage as any written in English.

"Taken together [Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat] are a British equivalent of Evan S. Connell's classics, Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge." Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam...A superb novel." Maureen Corrigan, National Public Radio

"Gardam's writing is like painting on glass: vivid and translucent." Independent

"On its own, The Man in the Wooden Hat is funny and affecting, but read alongside Old Filth, it's remarkable." The New York Times

"The Old Filth trilogy restores us to an era rich in spectacle and bristling with insinuation and intrigue. Vivid, spacious, superbly witty, and refreshingly brisk." The Boston Globe

About the Author

Jane Gardam has twice won the Whitbread Award, for The Hollow Land, and Queen of the Tambourine. She is also the author of God on the Rocks, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and most recently, Faith Fox.