Last Friends

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What to expect

'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.

Critics Review

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
Gardam writes about love, death, loneliness, money and madness with such gentle ferocity that she is often compared to Jane Austen, though a closer analogy is with Samuel Beckett. The Old Filth trilogy should be read by anyone who has ever been interested in how we become who we are
Independent on Sunday
It's hard...not to be charmed by a writer with Gardam's substantial gifts
New York Times Book Review
A consummate storyteller, she writes of life with wonderful gusto and wry humour
Literary Review
Gardam's style is witty and graceful, at times reminiscent of Muriel Spark
Independent
Cinematic... the work of a maestro
Oldie
There is more humour, pathos and compassion crammed into this slim volume than many a book twice its length
Daily Mail
Her prose is so perceptive and fluid that it feels mentally healthful, exiling the noise and clutter of your mind as efficiently as a Schubert sonata
Scotsman
All three Gardam books are beautifully written but its a pleasure to note that Last Friends is the most enjoyable, the funniest and the most touching... Like [Robertson] Davies, she fills the pages of her trilogy with surprises that make the reader hurry forward
National Post

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