Start with The Good Soldier. It is under two hundred pages, it opens with the line about the saddest story its narrator has ever heard, and it is narrated by a man who understands almost nothing that happened to him. It is also the compressed version of Ford's whole technique — the time-shift, the doubling back, the detail whose significance only arrives forty pages later — which is exactly the training you need before Parade's End.
The obvious alternative is to begin with Parade's End because a television adaptation made it famous. That is 900-odd pages of the same method at four times the scale, and readers who start there routinely stall in the first volume. Ford wrote more than eighty books and is remembered for about five, so a reading order for him is mostly a matter of knowing what to skip.
Parade's End, read as four novels
Read Some Do Not first: Christopher Tietjens, his wife Sylvia, and the suffragette Valentine Wannop, before the war. It is the hardest of the four to enter and the one that makes everything after it legible, so do not skim it. Then No more parades, Tietjens at a base depot in France processing drafts under shellfire while his marriage follows him to the front — the volume that earns the sequence its reputation as the best English fiction about the First World War. Then A man could stand up, the most technically extreme of the four and the emotional peak.
Then the argument. Last post is the postwar coda, and it is genuinely contested: Ford later wished he had not written it, and Graham Greene cut it out of his edition entirely, so a tetralogy became a trilogy on an editor's judgement. The case against it is that it dissipates the pressure the first three build and hands the narration to characters we have less reason to care about. The case for it is that the sequence is about what survives the war, and cutting the survival is a strange way to make that point.
Read it. The argument is part of reading Parade's End, and you cannot have a view on a book you skipped. Buy an edition that includes all four, and check the contents page — some do not.
The Fifth Queen, and a warning about editions
The Fifth Queen is Katharine Howard at the court of Henry VIII, in dense archaic prose that Conrad called the swan song of historical romance. It is the best of his pre-war fiction and nothing like The Good Soldier.
Check what your copy contains before buying. It is the first of three linked novels — followed by Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned — and modern editions almost always print all three under the single title, which is why the page count varies so wildly between listings. A slim volume is one novel; a fat one is the trilogy. Our catalogue holds one record for it either way.
Ladies whose bright eyes is the lighter companion piece: a modern publisher thrown back into the fourteenth century after a train crash, odd and genuinely funny, and worth reading after The Fifth Queen rather than instead of it.
The memoirs and the criticism
One warning applies to all three. Ford treated fact as raw material and lied in his memoirs constantly, knowingly and often charmingly. Read them as performances.
Joseph Conrad - A Personal Remembrance was written weeks after Conrad's death about their years of collaboration and is openly composed the way a novel is; it is the clearest statement of the impressionist theory that produced The Good Soldier. Return to yesterday is pre-war literary London — James, Crane, the founding of a magazine — entertaining and unreliable in equal measure. The march of literature, from Confucius to modern times was his last book: all of world literature written from memory by a dying novelist with no scholarly apparatus whatsoever. Useless as reference, superb as criticism, and the right place to finish.
Where to stop
After Parade's End, if you want the two things he is actually remembered for. The full order is in the Ford Madox Ford reading path.
