Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times " A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex society business and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries fashions and frivolities personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture at once gay and melancholy of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer already a passionate womanizer and Stringham aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s these four gain their initiations into sex society business and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Includes these novels: A Question of Upbringing A Buyer's Market The Acceptance World "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. Hisadmirers are addicts let us face it held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth which ponders changing relationships and values which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked as it began something like a comedy of manners; then for a while like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining deeply melancholy yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven New Yorker
