The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion - Hardcover

Ford Madox Ford's shocking insight into the lives of two rich and idle couples whose vacuous existences are filled to bursting point with selfishness, jealousy and lust is a milestone in twentieth-century literature. Brilliantly cast and featuring the most deviously unreliable narrator since Iago, The Good Soldier tells a roller-coaster tragic-comic tale of characters who are by no means what they seem, and get exactly what they deserve. And as the author observes with chilling truthfulness, such people can wreak terrible damage on the innocent along the way.

Ford Madox Ford was born with the name Ford Hermann Hueffer in Surrey, in 1873. His father was a German-born music critic and his mother the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown. Ford junior grew up in a wealthy, bohemian and promiscuous milieu of writers and artists and began at an early age to write about it. He produced about 80 novels and works of non-fiction as well as poetry and essays, and founded two influential literary journals that helped launch the careers of writers including Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. Ford was aged 40 when he produced The Good Soldier, the shockingly original story that won him his unquestioned place in the pantheon of great twentieth-century novelists. He died, aged 65, in 1939.