Fairness: A Novel - Softcover

A richly textured and vibrant novel follows two unforgettable characters, Aldous Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual difficulties, and Helen, a serious and naive girl who is determined to lead a morally satisfying life but always finds herself in the most immoral of situations. Reprint.

This ingenious and inventive novelnominated for the Book Prize Long List for 2001 from the award-winning author of Jem (and Sam)at once comprises an autobiography of Aldous (Gus) Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual learning difficulties, and an erratic history of modern England. It is also and more so the story of Helen Hardress, the serious, slim, blond young woman who quickens Gus's pulse when they first meet in Normandy one summer in the early 1960s as she will, off and on, for the next twenty years. For no one's life is quite the same once Helen Hardress has passed through it. Least of all, that of the long-pining Gus. "Reading Ferdinand Mount is as much fun as pink gin. "Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review "Fairness is funny, touching, picaresque, decked out with eccentric characters, improbable, artful and, rarest of all, unfailingly entertaining. "Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "A quick, witty read with resonance. "Baltimore Sun