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Slow,
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7 reviews

Old Filth
by Jane Gardam

Published: 2006-06-01
Kindle Edition : 289 pages
1 member reading this now
12 clubs reading this now
3 members have read this book
Recommended to book clubs by 4 of 7 members
Book One in Jane Gardam's Old Filth Trilogy

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 ...
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Introduction

Book One in Jane Gardam's Old Filth Trilogy

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.

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Member Reviews

Overall rating:
 
 
by Lisa R. (see profile) 08/29/16

 
by Tara R. (see profile) 11/06/14

 
  "old filth"by Marilyn C. (see profile) 03/28/14

very English novel=written by an author who should be better n=known. Very dry but a very interesting novel.

 
  "Okay"by J A. (see profile) 01/28/13

Kind of sad story, but written well.

 
  "Not my kind of book"by Allison H. (see profile) 01/27/12

I found the book slow and boring, but there were others in my club that could do nothing but rave about it.

 
  "Old Filth"by Kristie G. (see profile) 01/27/12

A few of the members really liked the book. It was just not the type of book I usually enjoy

 
  "A Complex Life, Slowly Revealed"by Melissa M. (see profile) 12/28/11

Beautifully written, and gracefully woven. Jane Gardam reveals the life of Old Filth (the nickname an acronym that explains a lot - but certainly not that he is "dirty") from birth in Malaya to old age... (read more)

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