'I love Jane Gardam, especially Old Filth' Nina Stibbe
'One of the finest writers around. Old Filth has stayed with me for years...Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words' Sathnam Sanghera
'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
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 (Failed In London, Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood.
Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the demands of his 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.
Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.
Review
A magnificent, deeply moving and compassionate portrait of an era and a sentimental education - Daily Mail
Beautiful, vivid and defiantly funny - The Times
I recommend it wholeheartedly for its economy, breadth of narrative, and its insight, humour and pathos - Mail on Sunday
What a spiky brilliant sledgehammer of a novel is Jane Gardam's Old Filth - Patrick Ness
This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece... On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read for years... This is the rare novel that drives its reader forward while persistently waylaying and detaining by the sheer beauty and inventiveness of its style... her cunning wit, moving deftly between scenes and eras, displays the tragedy of a vintage world forever passing away - Guardian
It's a cliché to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades - Amanda Craig
Excellent and compulsively readable... Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters - New York Times
Jane Gardam's work is rich and diverse and she writes beautifully... She's a treasure of contemporary English writing - Ian McEwan
Like Samuel Beckett, Gardam continually explores the corrosive loneliness of being alive and the courage it takes to continue... Readers will relish Old Filth for its compassionate wisdom, its comprehension of the way we lived then and live now, and for its absolute mastery of authorial tone - the product of a lifetime of experience and craft... It is a Rembrandt portrait of a novel... Don't miss it - New Statesman
One of the finest writers around... Old Filth has stayed with me for years... Can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words - Sathnam Sanghera
Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit - Patrick Gale
Excellently observed and quietly moving... Gardam invents an apparently composed character, and then disassembles him into pieces which - on closer inspection - look jagged and in poor repair - Independent on Sunday
Gardam pulls off the near-impossible trick of great emotional depth delivered with wingtip lightness... Her characters are drawn with rich humour, and Old Filth himself is a marvellous, moving creation whose company you find yourself sad to leave - Telegraph
Told with compassion and great style, Gardam seems to get better as she gets older -- John Humphrys - New Statesman
Superb... quiet beauty, sly wit and heartbreaking humanity... the author has poignantly distilled a life less ordinary into 259 unforgettable pages - Sunday Times
Sparkles with Gardam's wit, sensibility and poignancy and it deservedly earned an Orange Prize nomination... a fictional life of absorbing, emotional sophistication about memory, loss and the vestiges of empire... a beautiful, melancholy novel which captivates, saddens and delights - Observer
Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers - Hilary Mantel
Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and - a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture - adult - Washington Post
I can't say I've read anything else like Old Filth, which stands out for me as a singular, opalescent novel, a thing of beauty that gives immense gratification to its lucky readers - Meg Wolitzer
Beautifully written and strangely moving - Spectator
A novel of great perception and quietly killing prose - Independent
Book Description
This funny and wise masterpiece is being reissued as one of five titles celebrating Abacus's 50th anniversary, with a new introduction from Nina Stibbe
From the Back Cover
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
FILTH, in his heyday, was an international lawyer with a practice in the Far East. Now, only the oldest QCs can remember that his nickname stood for Failed In London Try Hong Kong.
Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'Home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England. Jane Gardam's novel tells his story, from his birth in what was then Malaya to the extremities of his old age. In doing so, she not only encapsulates a whole period from the glory days of the British Empire, through the Second World War, to the present and beyond, but also illuminates the complexities of the character known variously as Eddie, the Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feathers.
'Beautiful, vivid, defiantly funny' The Times
'This novel is surely Gardam's masterpiece... On the human level, it is one of the most moving fictions I have read in years' Guardian
'Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers' Hilary Mantel
'Old Filth has stayed with me for years... I can't think of anyone who achieves so much with so few words' Sathnam Sanghera
About the Author
Jane Gardam has been awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature; has twice won a Whitbread Award and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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