Olivia Manning

Balkan Trilogy

Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married, arrive in Bucharest in the autumn of 1939. The city they find is one of contrasts and rumours, on the edge with wavering loyalties and the tension of war, peopled with an international cast of characters, including the inimitable and eccentric Russian emigre Prince Yakimov.

The Great Fortune

Jane Smiley

Orphaned, friendless and bewildered, young felix Latimer comes to war-time Jerusalem to lodge with Miss Bohun.

School for Love

The Fortunes of Waris a teeming, complex, and rich novel, alive with the uncertainty and adventure of civilian life during wartime. Olivia Manning has filled the pages of this epic work with vivid characters who, over the course of nearly a thousand pages, tell the larger story of Europe during the trauma of the Second World War. Harriet and Guy Pringle are young newlyweds when they arrive in Bucharest from England, eager to experience life in that cosmopolitan city. It is the autumn of 1939, only a few weeks after Germany’s invasion of Poland, and nobody thinks the war will go on for very long–though troop movements and treaties are the only topic of conversation. By the time the Pringles realize that they are in the middle of a worldwide conflict, it is too late to return home. The only thing to do is to join the great mass of displaced people–White Russians, journalists, attaches, and con artists–and move east to Athens. Manning’s mastery of the long form allows her to expand both outward and inward, tackling complexities of world politics and interpersonal relationships with equal panache.

The Balkan Trilogy

The Fortunes of War

Leaving behind Hitler's Europe, Guy and Harriet Pringle find refuge in Cairo, a city tense with fear. Another new arrival is Simon Boulderstone, a young officer who falls for Harriet's friend, Edwina. The trio battle with their unresolved problems, heightened by the uncertainties of war.

The Levant Trilogy

Autumn, 1939: newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle arrive in Bucharest, a city alive with growing uncertainty at the threat of impending war. Guy, resuming his position as a lecturer at the university, throws himself into Bucharest life, embracing those around him. Harriet, struggling to adjust to married life, and to her husband's friendship with the over-attentive Sophie, finds herself isolated and lonely in her new surroundings, cut off from the outside world.

The Balkan Trilogy 1

The Spoilt City

After successfully escaping Nazi-occupied greece, Guy and Harriet Pringle lay low in Egypt in 1941, only to find they must confront Harriet's precarious health and uncertainties about their marriage.

Fortunes of War

The Play Room

After an English professor and his bride have fled from German-occupied Rumania to Greece, their marriage is threatened by wartime dangers and personal conflicts.

Friends and Heroes

The Balkan Trilogy is the story of a marriage and of a war, a vast, teeming, and complex masterpiece in which Olivia Manning brings the uncertainty and adventure of civilian existence under political and military siege to vibrant life. Manning’s focus is not the battlefield but the café and kitchen, the bedroom and street, the fabric of the everyday world that has been irrevocably changed by war, yet remains unchanged. At the heart of the trilogy are newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle, who arrive in Bucharest—the so-called Paris of the East—in the fall of 1939, just weeks after the German invasion of Poland. Guy, an Englishman teaching at the university, is as wantonly gregarious as his wife is introverted, and Harriet is shocked to discover that she must share her adored husband with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Other surprises follow: Romania joins the Axis, and before long German soldiers overrun the capital. The Pringles flee south to Greece, part of a group of refugees made up of White Russians, journalists, con artists, and dignitaries. In Athens, however, the couple will face a new challenge of their own, as great in its way as the still-expanding theater of war.

Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy

Levant Trilogy

Gabriel Josipovici

Francis King

Ian Cochrane

Penguin Modern Stories

Balkan Triology

A romantic hero

Set in Bucharest during the 'phoney war', Harriet is the new bride of Guy Pringle, a lecturer at the university. Harriet, quiet and perceptive, discovers that considerable adjustment on her part may be needed, for the man she loves lives fiercely, sometimes she suspects, uncritically, through the outer world. The outer world in this case is a city of contrasts and rumours, on edge with wavering loyalties and the tensions of war. The fall of Paris marks the nadir of news from outside, but for the English community, and for Harriet and Guy, it coincides with a drawing together, a consolidation of morale.

Great Fortune

The Story of Stanley's Rescue of Emin Pasha from Equatorial Africa

The Remarkable Expedition

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Olivia Manning

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