The Good Soldier

At the height of belle époque Europe, an American couple-the narrator John Dowell and his wife Florence-and a British couple-Leonora and the titular "good soldier" Edward Ashburnham-meet and become firm friends. Travelling and socialising together, it's a full nine years before the cracks start to show, but when they do the whole edifice starts tumbling to reveal the secrecy and lies concealed within.

The Good Soldier is a classic example of the unreliable narrator genre. With a charitable view, everything John Dowell retells is plausible, but it doesn't take much critical thinking to reframe the story's events as something entirely more sinister.

The novel is now frequently ranked by critics as one of the great pieces of twentieth-century literature. Ford Madox Ford, already published many times over by this novel's release, and along with collaborations with both Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, went on to create and edit the influential literature journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review.

Perfect for readers who love sophisticated psychological fiction and unreliable narrators, this masterpiece of literary modernism will keep you questioning what's real until the final page. Ford's brilliant exploration of hidden desires and moral complexity beneath polite society makes this essential reading for fans of Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)