Old Filth (The Old Filth Trilogy, 1)

First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. “Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (The New York Times Book Review).

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.

Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written an unforgettable novel reminiscent of Evan S. Connell’s books Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, and Rudyard Kipling’s Baa Baa, Black Sheep. Retracing much of the twentieth century’s torrid and momentous history, Old Filth is the first installment of an immersive and atmospheric trilogy that, taken together, tells the moving story of a long, complicated marriage.

“Old Filth is an extraordinary novel—the structure, the characters, the sweep of time.”—Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

“I don't know why Gardam isn't universally celebrated and beloved. Her prose is dazzling, and she writes with a kind of subdued but wicked humor that takes a moment to clamp down on you.”—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

“I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, ‘She can’t do that!,’ open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works.”—Denise Mina, author of Conviction

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The New York Times Book Review
The Washington Post
The San Francisco Chronicle
New York Magazine
The Globe & Mail
Slate