Fairness

Fairness is the fifth novel in Ferdinand Mount’s six-book Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which makes up the autobiography of Aldous (Gus) Cotton.

"The tone is Evelyn Waugh at his most witty and achingly wistful. A delight."  -  Daily Mail

Helen is a tiny, blonde, serious girl. Few of those who tangle with her are ever quite the same afterwards. The narrator meets Helen when they are both looking after children during a summer vacation in Normandy. Her adventures in search of a morally satisfying life lead her into situations that are neither satisfying nor moral, from the mining boom in Central Africa to the child abuse scandals of the late 1980s, in this erratic fictional history of the second half of the twentieth century.

"Fairness is the fifth and concluding volume of Mount’s sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, a fictional social history 25 years in the making, and inevitably reminiscent of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time... Fairness rambles but hits most of its targets dead-on. One wishes the entire Chronicle were available here and suspects this appealingly shaggy tale may look even better when read in its rightful context."    -  Kirkus Reviews

Sir Ferdinand Mount is better known as a political commentator than a novelist. Fairness was the fifth volume of his six-novel Chronicle of Modern Twilight series. Mount has run a career as an upper-echelon journalist alongside being an author. He was head of the No.10 Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher and has written as a columnist for the Sunday Times as well as being a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement.