The Balkan Trilogy

So 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

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 war

Sarah Waters

One must salute the brilliance ... the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances

Guardian

I 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

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 Young

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

Lush 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

Rereleased with glorious new covers ... it's an ambitious and classic series that'll utterly absorb you.

Stylist

So 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 of the finest fictional productions that Britain has seen since the war

Anthony Burgess