Last Friends, Jane Gardam
Last Friends, Jane Gardam
List: $23.99 | Sale: $16.79
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Last Friends
From the Orange Prize shortlisted author

Author: Jane Gardam

Narrator: Bill Wallis

Unabridged: 6 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/04/2015


Synopsis

'It's a cliche to compare novelists to Jane Austen, but in the case of Jane Gardam it happens to be true. Her diamond-like prose, her understanding of the human heart, her formal inventiveness and her sense of what it is to be alive - young, old, lonely, in love - never fades' Amanda Craig

'Her work, like Sylvia Townsend Warner's, has that appealing combination of elegance, erudition and flinty wit' Patrick Gale

'Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers' Hilary Mantel

Shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize.

Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love.

Veneering's were not the usual beginnings of an establishment silk: the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in northeast England and a devoted local girl, he escapes the war to emerge in the Far East as a man of panache, success and fame. But, always, at the stuffy English Bar he is treated with suspicion: where did this blond, louche, brilliant Slav come from?

Veneering, Filth and their friends tell a tale of love, friendship, grace, the bittersweet experiences of a now-forgotten Empire and the disappointments and consolations of age.

About Jane Gardam

Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill. Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Faith Fox; The Flight of the Maidens; the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends. Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire. She now lives in east Kent.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Sue on April 18, 2020

What a joy to read. Not every minute is happy, of course, but I finished with a satisfied smile on my face. So much of what happened and so many of the characters in the first two books of the Old Filth trilogy are fleshed out further here, given more depth, as only glimpses of their childhood can d......more

Goodreads review by Dar vieną puslapį on April 29, 2020

"Meilužis" - trečioji Gardam trilogijos dalis. Kaip sufleruoja pavadinimas, šįkart meilužis atskleidžia savo kortas ir pasakoja kaip viskas atrodo iš jo perspektyvos. Tiesa, turiu paminėti, kad pirmieji pusšimtis puslapių nustebino - Gardam įveda naują veikėją, senyvo amžiaus moteriškę, ir pagauni s......more

Goodreads review by JimZ on July 27, 2022

I liked ‘Old Filth’, the first book in this trilogy, a lot (4.5 stars on a re-read). But while I still liked the second book, ‘The Man in the Wooden Hat’, I did not like it was much as ‘Old Filth’. And I was blasé, ho-hum about this last book in the trilogy. Just as Gardam did not tell us anything a......more


Quotes

Sharp, humane, generous and wonderfully funny, she is one of our very finest writers Hilary Mantel

Exuberant and funny and dizzy and a little bit frightening... an ambitious and complex portrait of extraordinary times Guardian

Gardam's writing is beautiful - cool clear and wickedly funny The Times

As funny as as surreptitiously moving a novel as you'll find... her observations and sentences stalk you, making you chuckle in unexpected situations long after putting the book aside Daily Telegraph

She is a brilliant writer. Her prose sparkles with wit, compassion and humor. She keeps us entertained, and she keeps us guessing. Be thankful for her books. Be thankful for this trilogy, which is ultimately an elegy, created with deep affection Washington Post

Last Friends is evocative, elegiac, and shaded in autumnal tones, as suits the final volume in a trilogy. Like Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the Old Filth trilogy restores us to an era rich in spectacle and bristling with insinuation and intrigue. Vivid, spacious, superbly witty, and refreshingly brisk . . . the story (and the author) will endure Boston Globe

Her effortless command of character and narrative sweeps you right along...Among other things, she provides an unsentimental but oddly hopeful vision of old age New York Times

The satisfying conclusion to Gardam's Old Filth trilogy offers exquisite prose, wry humor, and keen insights into aging and death New Yorker

[Gardam] is the best kind of literary escape: serious, mesmerizing, and deeply satisfying Los Angeles Review of Books

If Rudyard Kipling was the laureate of the British Empire, then Jane Gardam is surely the closest thing we have to a laureate of its demise . . . Spanning nearly a century, the three novels offer a compelling, finely nuanced tableau of the end of an era and the passing of the generation that sustained it... a perfectly balanced ending to the trilogy that is Jane Gardam's masterpiece Times Literary Supplement


Awards

  • Folio Prize