Olivia Manning

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The Balkan Trilogy

The Balkan Trilogy 2

The Spoilt City

The Balkan Trilogy 3

Friends And Heroes

The Rain Forest

Doves Of Venus

A Romantic Hero

School For Love

The Great Fortune

Magnificent...full of wit, sharp insight and vivid description.

So glittering is the overall parade … and so entertaining the surface that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do these things so elegantly is no small achievement

A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war

A delicate, tough, mesmerising epic that grabs you by the hand and takes you straight into war, flight, and a complex and vulnerable young marriage

One must salute the brilliance … the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances

Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing

I shall be surprised, and, I must admit, dismayed if the whole work is not recognized as a major achievement in the English novel since the war. Certainly it is an astonishing recreation.

Lush and lyrical -- and darkly funny even at its most gut-punching -- Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy manages to simultaneously be a sweeping panorama of a Europe in crisis and a discomfitingly intimate portrait of a no-less-broken marriage.

Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature

An important 20th-century writer who paints a complex relationship between gender and power with wit and sensitivity

Inspired by Manning's own life, it's a portrait of a marriage as well as a disintegrating society, written with a cool eye and ironic style

Manning is an astute observer of people and writes eloquently about their traits and behaviours. Thus, The Great Fortune is rich with eccentric characters ... A real pleasure to re-read the first volume of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in this new Anniversary Edition and to revel in her erudite prose.

Manning's depictions of abandoned Harriet's solitary explorations of seething, colourful Bucharest are fabulous.

An addictive, gripping literary saga ... A sharp portrait of a young marriage under pressure and a vivid picture of being a Brit in an increasingly hostile and impoverished corner of Europe.

Olivia Manning takes autobiographical writing to a refreshingly new dimension. In The Balkan Trilogy she follows the well-worn mantra that authors should write about what they know, but she does so without sounding self-centred, a quality that so often dogs memoirs. Her's reads like wholly invented fiction with made-up, yet believable characters. It has been such a joy to re-read Manning's Trilogy...Manning's characterisation throughout the Trilogy is excellent. Her most astute depiction of a person in genuine inner conflict with himself is Guy Pringle...The author's depiction of Bucharest and the places Harriet and Guy visit are bold and colourful.

The Balkan Trilogy 1

Autumn, 1939. Newly-weds Guy and Harriet Pringle step aboard the train to Bucharest. Guy's lecturing job awaits, alongside friends and the ever-ardent Sophie - but for Harriet, alone and naive, it's a strange new life. As Guy's world collides with that of his new bride, Harriet realises how little she knows the man she has married. Manning's masterpiece, alive with exhilarating characters, is a haunting evocation of young love and the uncertainty of war.

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, spent much of her youth in Ireland and, as she put it, had ‘the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere’. The daughter of a naval officer, she produced her first novel; The Wind Changes, in 1937. She married just before the War and went abroad with her husband, R.D. Smith, a British Council Lecturer in Bucharest. Her experience there formed the basis of the work which makes up The Balkan Trilogy. As the Germans approached Athens, she and her husband evacuated to Egypt and ended up in charge of the Palestine Broadcasting Station. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there until her death in 1980.

The Great Fortune

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Olivia Manning

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