No More Parades - Ford Madox Ford

When No More Parades was first published in 1925, a critic in The Observer wrote of the first 100 pages that they "easily surpass in truth, brilliance and subtlety everything else that has yet been written in England about the physical circumstances and moral atmosphere of the war". The second novel in the Parade's End tetralogy, No More Parades places army captain (and former civil servant and statistician) Christopher Tietjens, his beautiful but cruel wife Sylvia, and Tietjens' jealous and tempestuous godfather and commanding officer General Campion in, and just behind, the lines at Rouen, France in 1917, where Christopher finds himself subject not only to physical, but also to mental and moral torments that speak volumes about the society of which he is a part, and which will perhaps surprise many a modern reader/listener. - Summary by Peter Dann