Book Description

The complete “wonderfully entertaining trilogy” about three British friends approaching their twilight years with bittersweet humor (The Washington Post). Jane Gardam’s beloved Old Filth Trilogy—including her masterpiece, Old Filth, voted one of the 100 greatest British novels in a BBC survey; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends—are here presented in one volume. Emotionally distant but highly successful Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth, a man who “belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (TheNew York Times Book Review), his beautiful wife Betty, and his devilishly handsome professional rival (and Betty’s onetime lover) Edward Veneering are the anchors of this series, with each novel focusing on a different character. Feathers was a “raj orphan”—children born in Far East British colonies and raised in England—while Veneering managed to get out of his fishing village-turned-industrial-town just before the German bombs dropped (and his luck has held up pretty well ever since). The three tells a bittersweet tale of enduring friendship while contending with the disappointments and consolations of age, while a once-insurmountable empire declines around them. It forms a deeply humane and often comic portrait of aging, and a reminder that the experiences we choose to take with us in our twilight years are as unpredictable as life itself. “Her prose is so perceptive and fluid that it feels mentally healthful, exiling the noise and clutter of your mind as efficiently as a Schubert sonata. She could make actuarial tables pleasurable.”—The New York Times Book Review “Gardam is the best British writer you’ve never heard of.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR