The book
“A masterpiece of storytelling.”—The Dallas Morning News
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 (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of 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.
“An extraordinary novel—the structure, the characters, the sweep of time.”—Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake
The author
Jane Gardam
Jane Gardam has been twice awarded the Whitbread Prize and was also a Booker prize finalist. She is winner of the David Higham Prize, the Royal Society for Literature’s Winifred Holtby Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize, and the Silver Pen Award from PEN. Her novels include God on the Rocks, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Old Filth, finalist for the Orange Prize; The Man in the Wooden Hat, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Last Friends, finalist for the Folio Award. She lives in the south of England near the sea.
In 1999 Jane Gardam was awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize in recognition of a distinguished literary career.
Press
- Jun 24 2016
The 75 Best Books of the Past 75 Years
— Parade - Aug 31 2015
Michele Zackeim of SVA's Summer Reading Friday Picks: "“Every character is marvelously intricate and sated with lop-sided, yet sane identities." - Jul 28 2015
Jane Gardam won the Charleston-Chichestor Award for Lifetime’s Excellence in Short Fiction on July 16th and will be presented the award on September 27th! - Jul 27 2015
ENCORE POST:Q&A with Jane Gardam - Jul 15 2014
Author Exposure: Author Robin Black cites Jane Gardam as influence - Jul 13 2014
Head Butler: "It’s worth the price of the book just to read that paragraph."