This ingenious and inventive novel from the award-winning author of Jem (and Sam) at once comprises an autobiography of Aldous (Gus) Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual learning difficulties, and an erratic history of modern England. It is also and more so the story of Helen Hardress, the serious, slim, blond young woman who quickens Gus's pulse when they first meet in Normandy one summer in the early 1960s as she will, off and on, for the next twenty years. For no one's life is quite the same once Helen Hardress has passed through it. Least of all, that of the long-pining Gus. "Reading Ferdinand Mount is as much fun as pink gin."--Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review "Fairness is funny, touching, picaresque, decked out with eccentric characters, improbable, artful and, rarest of all, unfailingly entertaining."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "A quick, witty read with resonance."--Baltimore Sun