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

An ambitious and complex portrait of extraordinary times

This is as mordantly precise and moving a novel as you will find anywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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. Part of the genius of each successive book is that it does not continue the story so much as rework it from a different angle.

It’s hard…not to be charmed by a writer with Gardam’s substantial gifts