Bibliography
Recommend a title for bookclub
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- The Wind Changes, c. 1937
- The Dreaming Shore, c. 1950
- School for Love, 1951
- A Different Face, c. 1953
- The Doves of Venus, c. 1960
- The Great Fortune, 1960
- The Spoilt City, 1962
- The Crimson Dawn, c. 1963
- Friends and Heroes, 1965
- The Play Room, c. 1969
- The Rain Forest, c. 1974
- The Danger Tree, 1977
- The Battle Lost and Won, 1978
- The Sum of Things, 1980
A Good Place To Start
| Title | Votes | |
|---|---|---|
| The Great Fortune | 1 | |
| The Danger Tree | 1 |
Genres
Categorization is odious. There is tremendous overlap among genres. These pigeonholes are offered only as a convenience.
Olivia Manning (1911 - 1980)
added by dropo59
Comments
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The Danger Tree is the first novel in Manning's very impressive Levant Trilogy. Although the Levant Trilogy comes after the Balkan Trilogy, both in terms of publication and story-line, it's perhaps better to read the more action-oriented Levant Trilogy first and then backtrack to the Balkan Trilogy.
imogen October 20th, 2008 05:13 PM PST
Definitely start with the Balkan Trilogy. The first book is The Great Fortune but both trilogies come as bound volumes.
They are wonderful books combining the geography of some of the remoter parts of Europe (and then the Middle East) with a personal history of the start of WWII and how it affected people. It is above all a portrait of a couple (Guy and Harriet Pringle) in the early years of their marriage in turbulent times.
Biography
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Olivia Manning (March 2, 1908 in Portsmouth – July 23, 1980 on the Isle of Wight) was a noted British novelist. She studied at the Portsmouth School of Art then escaped Portsmouth to work at Peter Jones department store, the Medici Society and for MGM. Her first novel under her own name, The Wind Changes, was published in 1937. Before that she had written romantic thrillers under the pseudonym Jacob Morrow.
Manning married her husband R.D. "Reggie" Smith in 1939. He was a British Council teacher and later a BBC radio producer. In 1955, The Doves of Venus was published.
Olivia Manning is best known for Fortunes of War, a narrative consisting of two trilogies (The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy) chronicling the wartime experiences of a group of English expatriates who find themselves moving between Romania, Greece, Egypt and Palestine as World War II progresses.
Anthony Burgess described Fortunes of War as ‘the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer’. Certainly, the first two volumes (The Great Fortune, published in 1960 and The Spoilt City, published in 1962) make compelling reading. Set against the background of Bucharest in early wartime, they have a superb period feel, chronicling the changes in Romanian society (and the lives of the British expatriate community) as the corrupt regime of King Carol II tries unsuccessfully to keep Romania out of the war. The leading characters, Harriet and Guy Pringle (the latter a lecturer and a passionate communist), are based on Manning herself and her husband R. D. Smith. The third volume, Friends and Heroes take place in Greece and Athens as the Greeks were gaining the first allied victories against the Italians. Meanwhile, the couple strive to save their marriage against a background of rumours, betrayals and political intrigues.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_Manning
dropo59 February 3rd, 2006 07:47 PM PST