Old Filth by Jane Gardam

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 and emotionally hollow 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 a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep 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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

- Google

The 894th greatest fiction book of all time


This book is on the following lists:

  1. - 71st on The 100 Greatest British Novels (BBC)
  2. - The 75 Best Books of the Past 75 Years (Parade Magazine)

Buy This Book

Name Binding Sales Rank Lowest New Lowest Used Published
The Man in the Wooden Hat Audible Audio Edition 41612 $15.95 2011
Old Filth (Old Filth Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition 28407 2006
Old Filth Paperback 2766466 $3.44 $0.01
Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy Book 3) Kindle Edition 115267 2013
Last Friends Hardcover 1683694 $9.21 $3.59
Last Friends Paperback 12446491 $0.65 2013
The Man in the Wooden Hat (Old Filth Trilogy Book 2) Kindle Edition 65175 2009
The Man in the Wooden Hat Hardcover 561473 $2,128.01 $1.99 2009
Man in the Wooden Hat Paperback 2405756 $10.01 $0.63 2011
Old Filth (Abacus 40th Anniversary) Paperback 7958711 $25.34 $0.67 2013
The Man in the Wooden Hat (Old Filth Trilogy) Paperback 211325 $8.27 $1.33 2009
Jane Gardam's Old Filth Trilogy Boxed Set Paperback 938407 $787.30 $39.21 2014
Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy 3) Paperback 4392065 $11.99 $2.92 2014
Old Filth Audible Audio Edition 15135 $15.95 2011
Last Friends Audible Audiobook 275770 $17.71 2015
Old Filth Audible Audio Edition 128598 $20.98 2015
The Man in the Wooden Hat Paperback 9360570 $7.03 $1.68 2014
The Man in the Wooden Hat 1st (first) edition Text Only Paperback 13473873 $59.88 $8.04
Old Filth (Old Filth Trilogy) Kindle Edition 3460 $1.99 2006
The Man in the Wooden Hat (Old Filth Trilogy) Kindle Edition 42338 $10.99 2009
The Old Filth Trilogy: Old Fifth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, and Last Friends Kindle Edition 523379 $31.99 2020
Old Filth Hardcover 4253705 $31.35 $1.61 2004
Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) Paperback 179635 $4.39 $0.88 2013
Old Filth (Old Filth Trilogy) Paperback 53056 $8.01 $1.21 2006
Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy Book 3) Kindle Edition 317155 $10.88 2013
Old Filth (Old Filth Trilogy 1) Paperback 661346 $9.68 $1.35 2014