Last Post: Parade's End, Volume IV

By Ford Madox Ford

“The finest English novel about the Great War” – Malcolm Bradbury, Guardian

Last Post is the fourth and final novel of Ford Madox Ford's highly regarded sequence of four novels, Parade's End. 

The Parade's End novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World

• Language: English
• Publisher: Woolf Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925788235

Ford Madox Ford

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an English novelist, poet, and editor. Born in Wimbledon, Ford was the son of Pre-Raphaelite artist Catherine Madox Brown and music critic Francis Hueffer. In 1894, he eloped with his girlfriend Elsie Martindale and eventually settled in Winchelsea, where they lived near Henry James and H. G. Wells. Ford left his wife and two daughters in 1909 for writer Isobel Violet Hunt, with whom he launched The English Review, an influential magazine that published such writers as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. As Ford Madox Hueffer, he established himself with such novels as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903), cowritten with Joseph Conrad, and The Fifth Queen (1906-1907), a trilogy of historical novels. During the Great War, however, he began using the penname Ford Madox Ford to avoid anti-German sentiment. The Good Soldier (1915), considered by many to be Ford’s masterpiece, earned him a reputation as a leading novelist of his generation and continues to be named among the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Recognized as a pioneering modernist for his poem “Antwerp” (1915) and his tetralogy Parade’s End (1924-1928), Ford was a friend of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Despite his reputation and influence as an artist and publisher who promoted the early work of some of the greatest English and American writers of his time, Ford has been largely overshadowed by his contemporaries, some of whom took to disparaging him as their own reputations took flight.

Reviews for Last Post

[kukulaj · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ford is really a master of this modern stream of consciousness style. This novel flows with nary a bump. Here we get to meet Marie Leonie and her husband Mark. I'll skip revealing the plot because it is definitely fun to let Ford present things bit by bit.Here's a parallel work: Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil. At the end of the movie, the hero and his partner have escaped the crazy world to a beautiful little corner of the country, with a vegetable garden etc. The hero's mother is a bit like the book's Sylvia, all glittery society and fashion. The horrors of the dystopia of the movie are like the horrors of WW1. My wife was comparing Sylvia and Christopher to some characters in a Somerset Maugham novel. Yeah there are probably scores of works of fiction that cover similar territory. Anyway, Ford does it with real style!