Balkan Trilogy 1: Great Fortune

Magnificent...full of wit, sharp insight and vivid description. ― The Times

Wonderfully entertaining ― Observer

So glittering is the overall parade … and so entertaining the surface that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do these things so elegantly is no small achievement ― Sunday Times

A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war -- Sarah Waters

A delicate, tough, mesmerising epic that grabs you by the hand and takes you straight into war, flight, and a complex and vulnerable young marriage -- Louisa Young

One must salute the brilliance … the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances ― Guardian

Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing ― Sunday Telegraph

I shall be surprised, and, I must admit, dismayed if the whole work is not recognized as a major achievement in the English novel since the war. Certainly it is an astonishing recreation. ― New York Times

Lush and lyrical -- and darkly funny even at its most gut-punching -- Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy manages to simultaneously be a sweeping panorama of a Europe in crisis and a discomfitingly intimate portrait of a no-less-broken marriage. -- Tara Isabella Burton, author of Social Creature

An important 20th-century writer who paints a complex relationship between gender and power with wit and sensitivity -- Lauren Elkin