Old Filth

Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. 

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.

"She does fiction as it should be done, with confidence and insight."  - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

"Gardam's superb new novel is surely her masterpiece... one of the most moving fictions I have read in years... This is the rare novel that drives its readers forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style."  -  The Guardian 

Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history providing 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.

Jane Gardam has won Katherine Mansfield Award, the PEN Macmillan Silver Pen Award, the Whitbread Novel Award (twice), and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was recently awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of her distinguished literary career.