The Great Fortune: The Balkan Trilogy, Book 1

It was a strange, uncertain world that Harriet entered when she married Guy Pringle. Guy taught English at the university at Bucharest, a city of vivid contrasts, where professional beggars exist alongside the excesses of mid-European royalty and expatriate journalists with a taste for truffles and quails in aspic. Underlying this is a fitful awareness of the proximity of the Nazi threat to a Romania which is enjoying an uneasy peace. In this exotic landscape Harriet gets to know her new husband and to wonder at the complexity of the apparently simple man she had married.

Born in Portsmouth, Olivia Manning spent much of her youth in Ireland. In 1939 she married a British Council lecturer and joined him in Bucharest just as World War II broke out. Her wartime experiences form the basis of The Balkan Trilogy, of which The Great Fortune is the first volume. The Mannings found themselves evacuated to Athens, Egypt and finally Jerusalem. In 1946 they returned to London where Olivia...