Old Filth

Author: Jane Gardam

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $15.00 NZD
  • : 9780349139494
  • : Little Brown
  • : Abacus
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  • : March 2014
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  • : 27.99
  • : March 2014
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Jane Gardam
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  • : Paperback
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  • :
  • : English
  • : 823.914
  • :
  • : 272
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Barcode 9780349139494
9780349139494

Description

'Jane Gardam's work is rich and diverse and she writes beautifully. She's a treasure of contemporary English writing' Ian McEwan


'What a spiky brilliant sledgehammer of a novel is Jane Gardam's Old Filth' Patrick Ness


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.

Promotion info

A genuine masterpiece - funny, brilliant and wise - Old Filth is now reissued with a new cover.

Awards

Shortlisted for Orange Prize 2005.

Author description

Jane Gardam has been awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature; has twice won a Whitbread Award and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was awarded an OBE in January 2009.