Parade's End cover art

Parade's End

Penguin Classics

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Parade's End

By: Ford Madox Ford
Narrated by: Bill Nighy
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Consisting of four novels - Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and The Last Post - Parade's End is the story of Christopher Tietjens and his progress from the secure world of Edwardian England into the First World War and beyond.

Both a portrait of a love triangle - between Tietjens, his beautiful and reckless wife, Sylvia, and the suffragette Valentine - and a depiction of life on the Western Front, Parade's End is one of the greatest fictional works of the 20th century. Ranging from the drawing rooms of England to the trenches of France, and moving between past and present, it is a haunting exploration of identity, loss and memory.

Public Domain (P)2020 Penguin Audio Classics England Imperialism

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Good Soldier cover art
The Man Without Qualities cover art
A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement cover art
Confessions cover art
Charles Paris: A Second BBC Radio Collection cover art
Sentimental Education cover art
The Go-Between cover art
Middlemarch cover art
An American Tragedy cover art
The Odd Women cover art
A Tale of Two Cities cover art
Anna Karenina cover art
The Forsyte Saga, Volume 1 cover art
The Christmas Stories of Charles Dickens cover art
The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1 cover art
Mrs. Dalloway cover art
All stars
Most relevant
Golly. This is fascinating. A rich, complex, innovative novel, with a most intriguing combination of historical and psychological insights. Shifting perspectives, startlingly original characters, one of literatures’s most villainous ( and yet intriguing) women and plenty of villainous and/ or absurdly pompous idiotic, fragile men. And several engaging figures too, including the sprightly and independent heroine, Valentine. And at the centre, the complex and often infuriating whilst admirable Christopher ( and later ) his brother Mark. And all of this against the background of a society in turmoil in (and as a result of) the First World War.
Bill Nighy’s reading is a virtuoso performance, as befits this virtuoso huge and intriguing novel. I can see that it has something of a Marmite quality. Like Bill Nighy I like Marmite - and I like and admire this !

Magnificently original

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Bill Nighy is a delight to listen to. Brings the story alive, illuminating every detail

The narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A view on an older time and world How the world and its opinions has moved on

Fascinating read looking back in time

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sad when it ended. Vivid characters with interesting personalities, I will miss them and their world. Bill Nighy was fantastic as narrator. I’ve nothing but positive things to say about the whole story!

Loved it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Few novel sequences could be better. The books are worth reading and re-reading. The audio is perfectly measured and Nighy is wonderful.

Nighy's reading enhances a text that, thankfully, is now seen as a central modernist work.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I found this story accessible, moving and, in parts, very amusing. It is closer to Proust than anything I have read in English: a meandering storyline; introspection and “stream of consciousness”; characters who pop up again and again in the story; characters who are admirable, despicable or just plain hopeless.

Bill Nighy tackles this long, at times rambling text with its cast of upper class and working class characters admirably. His regional accents are well performed - though if I have one criticism, it is of the way the ‘lower’ classes in post-WWI Sussex all seem to speak with Northern accents. Nighy is not great at French or German either - but I think we can forgive him this. After all, I am not much good at acting!

This was a great introduction for me to the world of audiobooks. And also to a book that I hope I will come back to.

A real treat

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Surprisingly absorbing and emotional study of what is mainly a love triangle, with a few extra characters outside the triangle. Much of the story told through interior monologues. Stylistically interesting. Bill Nighy does a great job of the audio book.

Remarkable

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford is a frustratingly slow read, weighed down by excessive detail and a meandering plot. The fragmented writing style often makes it hard to follow, and Christopher Tietjens, while an interesting character, can come across as too distant and overly intellectual, which makes it hard to connect with him. Ford’s attempt to explore the upheavals of early 20th-century society gets lost in long-winded digressions, and for a novel meant to capture the emotional impact of war, it often feels strangely cold and detached.

Long and boring. (Stick with the TV series)

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I liked the narration but it’s very quiet.

The story is awfully dull. Just masses of repressed people, over-thinking about everything. Tedious.

Depressing and boring

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.