Old Filth (2006)

Old Filth is a legend as a lawyer in Asia and as a judge in the U.K. Properly known as Sir Edward Feathers, he owes his nickname to an acronym: He's considered ''the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong.'' He's ''spectacularly clean,'' Jane Gardam writes early on, ''ostentatiously clean.'' He's spectacularly lonely, too. In assured, bone-hard prose, Gardam draws lines between Filth's all-but-orphaned youth, the traumas he suffered during and after the Blitz, and his bewildering new life as a widower in the modern English countryside. Up until its cheap, Dr. Phil-worthy conclusion, his beautifully sad story is a small monument to desolation.