A Dance to the Music of Time - by Anthony Powell (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for the young writer Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age"--]cProvided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."

A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, 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 and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes to society, character, and relationships those shifting eras bring.

In this final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but its costs, physical and moral, were vast. Widmerpool's wife sets a snare for the young writer X. Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.

"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Includes these novels:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies

From the Back Cover

In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted.

Review Quotes

ONE OF THE 100 BEST NOVELS OF THE 20TH CENTURY-- "The Modern Library"

"A book which creates a world and eplores it in depth, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and complicated as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway "New York Times"

"A comic masterpiece, and the major achievement in post-war English fiction."--Bernard Bergonzi "The Guardian"

"A great chronicle. . . . Absolutely fascinating and the most important fiction since the war. . . . I would rather read Powell than any English novelist now writing."
--Kingsley Amis

"A series of intertwining stories, in mood at once hilarious, raffish, and melancholy. . . . The reader who likes to watch history unfold as social comedy while he savors the astringent taste of the best English prose is urged to immerse himself in the works of this astute and enchanting writer."--Arthur Schlesinger "Life Magazine"

"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."-- "Chicago Tribune"

"Dry, cool, humorous, elaborately and accurately constructed and quintessentially English. It is more realistic than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, to which it is often compared, and much funnier."--Evelyn Waugh

"I had that usual "'why-on-earth-didn't-i-think-of-that feeling I always get when I read your books. I study the stuff under a microscope, and I still can't see how you do it."--P. G. Wodehouse "letter to Anthony Powell"

"Immensely entertaining and deeply serious. . . . Reading Powell is like living someone else's life, inextricably tangled with one's own."-- "New York Times"

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . A vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human existence."--Naomi Bliven "New Yorker"

"The best modern novel since Ulysses."--Clive James

"When the time comes for the historian to get a sense of what life was like for the British between and during the two wars he can wrap up the whole era with Anthony Powell's incalculably brilliant series."-- "Time Magazine"

About the Author

Anthony Powell's work includes Miscellaneous Verdicts and Under Review, both available from the University of Chicago Press.