ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 of society, characters, and relationships that those shifting eras bring.

Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widmerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. A masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich portrait of life in England between the wars.

"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:
A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer's Market
The Acceptance World

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Anthony Powell (1905-2000) was one of the most critically acclaimed novelists of the twentieth century. His landmark twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, was named to the Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the twentieth century. His other novels include Afternoon Men, Venusberg, From a View to a Death, Agents and Patients, What's Become of Waring?, O, How the Wheel Becomes It!, and The Fisher King, all published by the University of Chicago Press. A condensed version of his four-volume memoir, To Keep the Ball Rolling, is also available from the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

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

"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

“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

"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

“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

"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

“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

"The best modern novel since Ulysses."

— Clive James

"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

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