The Good Soldier


Book Description

The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford At the fashionable German spa town Bad Nauheim, two wealthy, fin de siecle couples - one British, the other American - meet for their yearly assignation. As their story moves back and forth in time between 1902 and 1914, the fragile surface propriety of the pre - World War I society in which these four characters live is ruptured - revealing deceit, hatred, infidelity, and betrayal. "The Good Soldier" is Edward Ashburnham, who, as an adherent to the moral code of the English upper class, is nonetheless consumed by a passion for women younger than his wife - a stoic but fallible figure in what his American friend, John Dowell, calls "the saddest story I ever heard."




The Good Soldier


Book Description

After his wife’s death, a man untangles the truth of her infidelity, in this masterful novel of pre-WWI England by the celebrated author of Parade’s End. When John Dowell and his wife, Florence, leave America for a stay at a German spa, they meet Capt. Edward Ashburn and his wife, Leonora. The two couples develop a close friendship that lasts for years—until Florence dies and John learns about her long-standing affair with Edward. The infidelity is shocking only to John, however. It seems Leonora has known all along. As John attempts to reconstruct the truth of his marriage, he begins to understand that nothing was what it appeared to be—not his friendship with Edward, his wife’s heart condition, or his own feelings about the life he chose. A pioneering work of literary impressionism, author Ford Madox Ford presents a series of flashbacks from the memory of an unreliable narrator to create what is considered “one of the few stylistically perfect works in any language” (The Guardian).




The Good Soldier


Book Description

he Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the story of those dissolutions, plus the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth, in a rambling, non-chronological fashion. As an unreliable narrator the reader can consider whether they believe Dowell and his description of how the events unfolded including his own role in the "saddest story ever told".




Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier


Book Description

This volume marks the centenary of Ford Madox Ford s masterpiece "The Good Soldier." It includes groundbreaking work on the novel s narrative technique, chronology, and genre; pioneering work on bodies and minds; eugenics; poison; and surveillance; and innovative comparative studies."




The 100 Best Novels in English


Book Description

LITERARY COMPANIONS, BOOK REVIEWS & GUIDES. Everybody loves a list but this is a list of major ambition: namely, to select the best 100 novels in the English language, published from the late 17th century to the present day. This list has been built up week by week in The Observer since September 2013, and selected by writer and Observer editor Robert McCrum. With a short critique on each book, this is a real delight for literary lovers.




The Good Soldier


Book Description




The Good Soldier


Book Description

The Good Soldier A Tale of Passion By Ford Madox Ford "saddest story ever told" The Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the stories of those dissolutions as well as the deaths of three characters and the madness of a fourth, in a rambling, non-chronological fashion that leaves gaps for the reader to fill. The "plot" is not then the real story; the reader is asked to consider whether they believe Dowell and what part he truly played in how this "saddest story ever told" actually plays out. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is a 1915 novel by English novelist Ford Madox Ford. It is set just before World War I and chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to whom the title refers, and his own seemingly perfect marriage and that of two American friends. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order, a literary technique that formed part of Ford's pioneering view of literary impressionism. Ford employs the device of the unreliable narrator to great effect as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads the reader to believe. The novel was loosely based on two incidents of adultery and on Ford's messy personal life. The novel's original title was The Saddest Story, but after the onset of World War I, the publishers asked Ford for a new title. Ford suggested (sarcastically) The Good Soldier, and the name stuck. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Good Soldier 30th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2015, the BBC ranked The Good Soldier 13th on its list of the 100 greatest British novels.




The Winter Soldier


Book Description

The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of North Woods and The Piano Tuner is "a dream of a novel...part mystery, part war story, part romance" (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See). Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone. "The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." —Anthony Marra, New York Times Book Review




The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Collins Classics)


Book Description

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.




Soldier of Rome: The Legionary


Book Description

Rome's Vengeance In the year A.D. 9, three Roman Legions under Quintilius Varus were betrayed by the Germanic war chief, Arminius, and destroyed in the forest known as Teutoburger Wald. Six years later Rome is finally ready to unleash Her vengeance on the barbarians. The Emperor Tiberius has sent his adopted son, Germanicus Caesar, into Germania with an army of forty-thousand legionaries. The come not on a mission of conquest, but one of annihilation. With them is a young legionary named Artorius. For him the war is a personal vendetta; a chance to avenge his brother, who was killed in Teutoburger Wald. In Germania Arminius knows the Romans are coming. He realizes that the only way to fight the legions is through deceit, cunning, and plenty of well-placed brute force. In truth he is leery of Germanicus, knowing that he was trained to be a master of war by the Emperor himself. The entire Roman Empire held its collective breath as Germanicus and Arminius faced each other in what would become the most brutal and savage campaign the world had seen in a generation; a campaign that could only end in a holocaust of fire and blood.