The Spoilt City

Magnificent … full of wit, sharp insight and vivid description. * The Times *Wonderfully entertaining * Observer *A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war – Sarah WatersSo 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 * Sunday Times *One most salute the brilliance … the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances. * Guardian *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’ – Louisa YoungI 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. * New York Times *Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing. * Sunday Telegraph *An important 20th-century writer who paints a complex relationship between gender and power with wit and sensitivity. – Lauren Elkin, author of FlâneuseLush 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

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, spent much of her youth in Ireland and, as she puts 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 experiences 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.

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