Parade's end

Some Do Not (1924) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. Set during the First World War, the novel is the story of Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant statistician and wealthy aristocrat known as "the last Tory." As he moves from a faithless marriage into an affair of his own, eventually volunteering to fight under dubious-perhaps suicidal-motives, Tietjens appears both symbolic and tragically human, a casualty of a dying era dedicating its final breaths to...

As WWI ends, trauma and tragedy give way to a chance for new life and rekindled love in the third novel of the acclaimed Parade's End tetralogy. Armistice Day, 1918. As fireworks proclaim the end of the Great War, Valentine Wannop learns that the man she loves, Christopher Tietjens, is back in London. He has survived the frontlines, but it has affected him profoundly. He is willing to give up everything to be with Valentine, but they are not yet free...

The novels chronicle the life of Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory", a brilliant government statistician from a wealthy landowning family who is serving in the British Army during World War I. His wife Sylvia is a flippant socialite who seems intent on ruining him. Tietjens may or may not be the father of his wife's child. Meanwhile, his incipient affair with Valentine Wannop, a high-spirited suffragette, has not been consummated, despite what...