The Good Soldier

'This is the saddest story I have ever heard,' begins John Dowell, a wealthy American who for nine years spent his summers at a German spa with his wife Florence and an English couple: Captain Edward Ashburnham, an apparently perfect gentleman and soldier, and his wife Leonora. The four seemed the best of friends. Only after Florence's death does Dowell begin to discover what was really happening, and as he tells the story out of order, circling back and contradicting himself, the reader starts to wonder how much he understood, or chose not to see.

Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), English novelist and editor, who wrote two novels together with Joseph Conrad, published the book in 1915 and considered it his best. It is a masterpiece of the unreliable narrator, as carefully built as a detective story.