num_pages: 290
description: Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate. Old Filth was nominated for the 2005 Orange Prize.
language: English
title: Old Filth
titlecomplete: Old Filth (Old Filth, #1)
genres: Asia, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Historical, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, British Literature, Fiction, Contemporary
ratings_count: 17746
places: Dorset, England, Malay Peninsula, England, Malaysia, Hong Kong
series: Old Filth
awards: awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Orange Prize
category: Fiction Shortlist, awardedAt: 1514793600000
name: Europese Literatuurprijs
publisher: Europa Editions