The Forsyte Saga: Volume 3

The story continues. Britain between the wars — jazz, cocktails, the General Strike, the slow dissolution of certainties that once seemed unshakeable. The third volume of Galsworthy’s great saga takes the Forsyte family through the final stages of its transformation: from the Victorian confidence of Soames’s generation to the post-war world of his daughter Fleur, who belongs to a Britain that has not yet decided what it is.

Galsworthy’s eye for social detail is as sharp as ever in these final novels, and his compassion for his characters — even the most flawed — never wavers. Soames, who began the saga as a figure of some severity, has become by these final volumes something more complicated and more moving: a man who is genuinely trying to understand a world that has passed him by, and who loves his daughter with a completeness that his whole previous life made him incapable of showing anyone.

The complete Forsyte Saga is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century English fiction. This third volume brings it to a conclusion that is both inevitable and deeply satisfying. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.