The Balkan Trilogy - Softcover

Olivia Manning

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140059369 ISBN 13: 9780140059366

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1982

Synopsis

The Balkan Trilogy

About this title

About the Author:

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, England and spent much of her youth in Ireland. She married just before World War II and went to live in Bucharest with her husband. Her experience there formed the basis of the work that makes up The Balkan Trilogy. As the Germans approached Athens, she and her husband evacuated to Egypt and ended up in Jeruslam where her husband worked at the Palestine Broadcasting Station. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there until her death in 1980.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review:

Series of three novels by Olivia Manning, first published together posthumously in 1981. Consisting of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965), the trilogy is a semiautobiographical account of a British couple living in the Balkans during World War II. The complex narrative, composed of several different voices, is noted for its vivid historicity. In The Great Fortune, newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle encounter an increasingly fascist environment in Bucharest, Romania, in 1939. Guy is a gregarious university lecturer whose liberal views contrast with those of his reserved wife. Clarence Lawson is a colleague of Guy who worships him and finds Harriet attractive. In The Spoilt City, Harriet faces marital problems and befriends Sasha Drucker, a Romanian army deserter, and Prince Yakimov, a Russian emigre. Just before the arrival of German troops in Bucharest, Guy sends Harriet to Greece, where they are reunited in Friends and Heroes. Guy acquires a teaching post and becomes involved in communist politics. By the end of the novel, the Pringles repair their marriage and flee to Cairo, where their story is continued in The Levant Trilogy. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0140059369
• ISBN 13: 9780140059366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 928