Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), the fifth book, finds Nick marrying Isobel Tolland and launching happily into family life—including his new role as brother-in-law to Isobel’s many idiosyncratic siblings. But even as Nick’s life is settling down, those of his friends are full of drama and heartache: his best friend, Hugh Moreland, is risking his marriage on a hopeless affair, while Charles Stringham has nearly destroyed himself with drink. Full of Powell’s typically sharp observations about life and love, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant offers all the rewards and frustrations, pleasures and regrets of one’s thirties.

"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

"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times

"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker 

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”—Kingsley Amis

This work explores a Christian understanding of God’s presence in the world. As the Creator of all that exists, the Creator-Trinity is mysteriously present to all things, and truly but imperfectly knowable as such. In addition to this creative presence, however, there is also the manifestation of God’s presence as a gift of grace. By supernatural faith, the trinitarian life of God is made known to us as an object of the Christian mystical life. This life is centered especially upon God’s unique presence by way of Incarnation, human life, death, and resurrection, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This work ex­plores these notions in comparison with other religious traditions, in a Cath­olic as well as ecumenical perspective. Original considerations are offered re­garding the nature of scriptural inspiration, the Church as the mystical body of Christ, and the sacraments as instrumental expressions of the Incarnation, all with a view to the notion of mystical experience, and union with God. Principles of Catholic Theology, Book 5 is a continuation of Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s collection of essays, extending over a range of fundamental topics in Catholic dogmatic theology.