Ford Madox Ford's great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Julian Barnes.
A masterly novel of destruction and regeneration, Parade's End follows the story of aristocrat Christopher Tietjens as his world is shattered by the First World War. Tracing the psychological damage inflicted by battle, the collapse of England's secure Edwardian values - embodied in Christopher's wife, the beautiful, cruel socialite Sylvia - and the beginning of a new age, epitomized by the suffragette Valentine Wannop, Parade's End is an elegy for both the war dead and the passing of a way of life.
'The finest English novel about the Great War'
Malcolm Bradbury
'The best novel by a British writer ... It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society'
Anthony Burgess
'There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them'
W.H. Auden
'The English prose masterpiece of the time'
William Carlos Williams
Consisting of four novels - Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and The Last Post - Parade's End is the story of Christopher Tietjens and his progress from the secure world of Edwardian England into the First World War and beyond. Both a portrait of a love triangle - between Tietjens, his beautiful and reckless wife Sylvia, and the suffragette Valentine - and a depiction of life on the Western Front, Parade's End is one of the greatest fictional works of the twentieth century. Ranging from the drawing rooms of England to the trenches of France, and moving between past and present, it is a haunting exploration of identity, loss and memory.