Parade's End

Ford Madox Fords great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Julian Barnes.

A masterly novel of destruction and regeneration, Parades End follows the story of aristocrat Christopher Tietjens as his world is shattered by the First World War. Tracing the psychological damage inflicted by battle, the collapse of Englands secure Edwardian values - embodied in Christophers wife, the beautiful, cruel socialite Sylvia - and the beginning of a new age, epitomized by the suffragette Valentine Wannop, Parades End is an elegy for both the war dead and the passing of a way of life.

The finest English novel about the Great War
Malcolm Bradbury

The best novel by a British writer ... It is also the finest novel about the First World War. It is also the finest novel about the nature of British society
Anthony Burgess

There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parades End is one of them
W.H. Auden

The English prose masterpiece of the time
William Carlos Williams