The Great Fortune

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

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

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

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

Lauren Elkin

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

Inspired by Manning's own life, it's a portrait of a marriage as well as a disintegrating society, written with a cool eye and ironic style

Henrietta McKervey, Irish Independent

Magnificent...full of wit, sharp insight and vivid description.

The Times

Manning is an astute observer of people and writes eloquently about their traits and behaviours. Thus, The Great Fortune is rich with eccentric characters ... A real pleasure to re-read the first volume of Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy in this new Anniversary Edition and to revel in her erudite prose.

Bookmunch

Manning's depictions of abandoned Harriet's solitary explorations of seething, colourful Bucharest are fabulous.

Daily Mail

An addictive, gripping literary saga ... A sharp portrait of a young marriage under pressure and a vivid picture of being a Brit in an increasingly hostile and impoverished corner of Europe.

The Times

Olivia Manning takes autobiographical writing to a refreshingly new dimension. In The Balkan Trilogy she follows the well-worn mantra that authors should write about what they know, but she does so without sounding self-centred, a quality that so often dogs memoirs. Her's reads like wholly invented fiction with made-up, yet believable characters. It has been such a joy to re-read Manning's Trilogy...Manning's characterisation throughout the Trilogy is excellent. Her most astute depiction of a person in genuine inner conflict with himself is Guy Pringle...The author's depiction of Bucharest and the places Harriet and Guy visit are bold and colourful.

Bookmunch