A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement - Softcover

Powell, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226677141 ISBN 13: 9780226677149

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1995

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

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

Powell's epic of 20th-century England is actually composed of 12 novels divided into four "movements," although they can be read individually as separate works. The novels were originally published from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226677141
• ISBN 13: 9780226677149
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 732