Parade's End

Parade’s End has been described by Mary Gordon as “the best fictional treatment of war in the history of the novel.” 

What made me truly connect with the story is its protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, who serves in the British Army during the “Great War.”

A member of a prominent, landowning family, Tietjens is driven by a strong sense of duty and commitment to marriage and country—whatever the cost to himself. Although he is in love with Valentine, he remains married to his promiscuous wife, Sylvia, and accepts as his son a child who may not be his.

But Tietjens’ experiences… show more.

Ford Madox Ford's magnificent multi-volume novel about British society up to and through the First World War was written out of the author's own experience and appeared in 1924. It was Ford's belief that a novelist should be a "historian of his own time". In this, he brilliantly succeeded. The events he chronicled are now 100 years in the past, but the trilogy is still a wonderfully complex set of psychological novels with an intricate plot that traces the consequences of a lie through British society before and during WWI. It is also a moving and delicate love story, and… show more.