Synopses & Reviews
Olivia Manning (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R.D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. During World War II , the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece, then to Egypt, and finally to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was
The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes,
The Balkan Trilogy and
The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as
Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later.
Anthony Sattin is a journalist, broadcaster, and former resident of Cairo. Among his published works of nonfiction are The Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile. His latest book, Young Lawrence, about the five years T. E. Lawrence spent in the Middle East before World War I, will be published in the United States in 2015.
Synopsis
Olivia Manning (1908–1980) was a British writer. Her first real success as a novelist was
The Great Fortune, the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes,
The Balkan Trilogy and
The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as
Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later. In addition to
The Balkan Trilogy, NYRB Classics has also published Manning’s novel
School for Love.
Anthony Sattin is a British writer of history and travel, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. He is the author of several highly-acclaimed books, including Lifting the Veil, The Pharaoh's Shadow, and The Gates of Africa. He is a regular contributor to the UK Sunday Times and Conde Nast Traveller.
About the Author
It’s the spring of 1941 and the German army’s eastward march appears unstoppable. In the Egyptian desert, the young officer Simon Boulderstone, twenty years old and wet behind the ears, waits in dreadful anticipation of his first experience of combat. The people of Cairo are waiting, too. In crowded apartments, refugees from Europe wait; in palm-shaded mansions, Anglo-Egyptians wait. At night they are joined in the city’s bars and cabarets by soldiers on leave, looking for a last dance before going off to the front lines.
Into this mix enter Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose story began in Olivia Manning’s magisterial Balkan Trilogy. They have successfully escaped Nazi-occupied Greece but are dogged by uncertainties about their marriage. And, as Simon discovers that the realities of war are both more prosaic and more terrible than he had imagined, Harriet is forced to confront her precarious health and her place beside her husband.