Parade's End – Ford Madox Ford by Ford Madox Ford

"There will be no more parades."

This tetralogy follows Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a brilliant statistician and aristocrat. Trapped in a disastrous marriage to the cruel socialite Sylvia, he falls in love with the suffragette Valentine Wannop. The novels chart the collapse of the Edwardian social order in the trenches of World War I and the painful birth of a new world.

Ford's masterpiece is a complex, modernist epic. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels about the First World War, exploring the psychological impact of the conflict on the English soul.