Spoilt City

'Her gallery of personages is huge, her scene painting superb, her pathos controlled, her humour quiet and civilised' - Anthony Burgess'Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing' - Sunday Telegraph'Wonderfully entertaining' - ObserverBucharest, 1940. The city is on the brink of invasion and Guy and Harriet Pringle find their position growing ever more dangerous. Harriet longs for safety, while Guy's idealism frustrates his new wife. But when the Germans march in, Guy believes they must separate in a desperate bid to find safety, so Harriet leaves for Athens. The Spoilt City is a dramatic and colourful portrait of a city in turmoil, and of a young couple struggling to make their marriage work in the face of adversity.

Magnificent ... full of wit, sharp insight and vivid description., Wonderfully entertaining, A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war, 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, One most salute the brilliance ... the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances.

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, spent much of her youth in Ireland and, as she puts it, had 'the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'. The daughter of a naval officer, she produced her first novel, The Wind Changes, in 1937. She married just before the War and went abroad with her husband, R.D. Smith, a British Council lec-turer in Bucharest. Her experiences there formed the basis of the work which makes up The Balkan Trilogy. As the Germans approached Athens, she and her husband evacuated to Egypt and ended up in charge of the Palestine Broadcasting Station. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there until her death in 1980.