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Old Filth
- Author
- Jane Gardam
- Narrator
- Bill Wallis
- Publisher
- Little, Brown Book Group
- Publish Date
- 4 June 2015
- Run Time
- 9 hours 29 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
'I love Jane Gardam, especially Old Filth' Nina Stibbe
'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale
'One of the finest writers around. Old Filth has stayed with me for years...Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words' Sathnam Sanghera
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 (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood.
Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the demands of his 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.
Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.
Critics Review
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Superb... quiet beauty, sly wit and heartbreaking humanity... the author has poignantly distilled a life less ordinary into 259 unforgettable pages
Sunday Times
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I was really moved by it and know that I will cry all over again when I re-read it
Lily King
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Beautiful, vivid and defiantly funny
The Times
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This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece... On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years... This is the rare novel that drives its reader forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style... her cunning wit, moving deftly between scenes and eras, displays the tragedy of a vintage world forever passing away
Guardian
See more reviews See fewer reviews
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Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers
Hilary Mantel
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It's a cliché to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades
Amanda Craig
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Jane Gardam's work is rich and diverse and she writes beautifully... She's a treasure of contemporary English writing
Ian McEwan
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One of the finest writers around... Old Filth has stayed with me for years... Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words
Sathnam Sanghera
-
Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit
Patrick Gale
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I recommend it wholeheartedly for its economy, breadth of narrative, and its insight, humour and pathos
Mail on Sunday
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The last great book I read
Rachel Weisz, Grazia
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I can't say I've read anything else like Old Filth, which stands out for me as a singular, opalescent novel, a thing of beauty that gives immense gratification to its lucky readers
Meg Wolitzer
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A magnificent, deeply moving and compassionate portrait of an era and a sentimental education
Daily Mail
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What a spiky brilliant sledgehammer of a novel is Jane Gardam's Old Filth
Patrick Ness
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Excellent and compulsively readable... Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters
New York Times
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Like Samuel Beckett, Gardam continually explores the corrosive loneliness of being alive and the courage it takes to continue... Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of the way we lived then and live now, and for its absolute mastery of authorial tone - the product of a lifetime of experience and craft... It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel... Don't miss it
New Statesman
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Excellently observed and quietly moving... Gardam invents an apparently composed character, and then disassembles him into pieces which - on closer inspection - look jagged and in poor repair
Independent on Sunday
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Gardam pulls off the near-impossible trick of great emotional depth delivered with wingtip lightness... Her characters are drawn with rich humour, and Old Filth himself is a marvellous, moving creation whose company you find yourself sad to leave
Telegraph
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Told with compassion and great style, Gardam seems to get better as she gets older
New Statesman
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Sparkles with Gardam's wit, sensibility and poignancy and it deservedly earned an Orange Prize nomination... a fictional life of absorbing, emotional sophistication about memory, loss and the vestiges of empire... a beautiful, melancholy novel which captivates, saddens and delights
Observer
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Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and - a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture - adult
Washington Post
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Beautifully written and strangely moving
Spectator
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A novel of great perception and quietly killing prose
Independent
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With superb skill and economy, Jane Gardam encapsulates the long lifetime of Sir Edward Feathers... Witty, humane, wise - this end-of-Empire tragicomedy is a masterclass in conducting shifting empathies
Daily Mail
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Jane Gardam
- Narrator
- Bill Wallis
- Duration
- 9 hours 29 minutes
- Release Date
- 4 June 2015
- ISBN
- 9781405532440
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Little, Brown Book Group
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general
Synopsis
'It's a cliche to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades' Amanda Craig'I love Jane Gardam, especially Old Filth' Nina Stibbe'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale'One of the finest writers around. Old Filth has stayed with me for years...Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words' Sathnam SangheraSir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the demands of his 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.Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.
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