Parade's End

Chronicling the wartime experiences of Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant government statistician and wealthy landowner, Parade’s End is a portrait of British society during the First World War. Described by Ford as the ‘last English Tory’, Tietjens is torn between his scheming and promiscuous socialite wife Sylvia and the progressive Valentine Wannop, a pacifist and suffragette — relationships framed by his reliance on a crumbling moral code. Ford presents a gritty and uncompromising portrait of Tietjens’s life in the trenches of Belgium and France, and his subsequent return home, suffering from crippling shell shock. Through a narrative brimming with modernist experimentation, we follow his struggle to reconcile his relationships while navigating the shifting sands of an evolving social order.

This two-volume edition unites Parade’s End with the work of award-winning illustrator James Albon. His reduction lino print illustrations were created through a process he describes as ‘so much more physical than drawing, making wildly different marks, and because nothing that has been cut out can be stuck back on, there is virtually no opportunity to correct any mistakes’. For each image, he created dozens of developmental sketches before carving a lino block, rolling it in a layer of ink and feeding it through a printing press. The results are bold and distinctive, with a wonderful sense of character, from the ‘lumpish’ Tietjens to the elegantly wicked Sylvia. They also capture brilliantly the orderliness of their pre-war world, and the volatility of the trenches.