Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant, unconventional mathematician, is married to the dazzling yet unfaithful Sylvia, when, during a turbulent weekend, he meets a young Suffragette by the name of Valentine Wannop. Christopher and Valentine are on the verge of becoming lovers until he must return to his World War I regiment. Ultimately, Christopher, shell-shocked and suffering from amnesia, is sent back to London. An unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society confronting catastrophe, sexuality, power, madness, and violence, this narrative examines time and a critical moment in history.

English novelist, Ford's eccentric personality and varied output has been attributed to the obscurity of his achievements. No More Parades is the second book of his four-volume work titled Parade's End. The subject was the world as it culminated in the war; the story centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and gentleman, the last English Tory, and follows him from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of the First World War. Against the backdrop of a world at war, Ford recounts the complex sexual warfare between Tietjens and his faithless wife Sylvia.

1926. A Novel. The third in a series that includes Some Do Not... and No More Parades. Ford's eccentric personality and varied output has been attributed to the obscurity of his achievements. The book begins: Slowly, amidst intolerable noises from, on the one hand the street and, on the other, from the large and voluminously echoing playground, the depths of the telephone began, for Valentine, to assume an aspect that, years ago it had used to have-of being a part of the supernatural paraphernalia of inscrutable Destiny.

The Last Post is the concluding chapter in Ford's Parade End's series. The critics were divided on whether Ford should even have written this novel as it gives short shrift to the main character, Christopher Tietjens, from the earlier books. However, others believe it had redeeming qualities, mainly to do with the symbolic nature of the Tietjens family, and that Ford's writing from the perspective of two characters is what makes this a highly readable book. The book begins: He lay staring at the withy binders of his thatch shelter; the grass was infinitely green; his view embraced four counties; the roof was supported by six small oak sapling-trunks, roughly trimmed and brushed from above by apple boughs. French crab apple! The hut had no sides.

Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, a tetralogy set in England during World War I, is widely considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century. First published as four separate novels ( Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up—, and The Last Post) between 1924 and 1928, Parade’s End explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war. Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine. A profound portrait of one man’s internal struggles during a time of brutal world conflict, Parade’s End bears out Graham Greene’s prediction that “There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford.”