The Last Post

“One of the few real masterpieces of fiction that have been produced during our era.” 
—New York Herald Tribune Book Review

On both the Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels and the BBC’s 100 Greatest British Novels, Parade’s End is one of the twentieth-century’s major literary achievements. The Last Post, the final volume of the tetralogy, takes place in the unsettled aftermath of the First World War. Christopher Tietjens, once the steadfast moral center of the sequence, is here largely absent—reconstructed through the partial, often unreliable voices of those around him. His wife Sylvia, brilliant and destructive; his brother Mark, immobilized and acutely observant; and Valentine Wannop, whose resilience offers a fragile counterpoint, together form a shifting chorus of memory, grievance, and self-deception. What emerges is not a conventional narrative of events, but a subtle exploration of perception, misremembering, and concealment. This Warbler Classics edition is based on The Literary Guild of America’s 1928 publication and includes a detailed biographical timeline.

FORD MADOX FORD (1873–1939) was born Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer in Kent, England. He was a prolific novelist, poet, critic, and editor whose influential journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review promoted the work of such writers as Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and D. H. Lawrence. Ford is best known for The Good Soldier, the Parade’s End tetralogy, and the The Fifth Queen trilogy.