Manning (Olivia) [The Balkan Trilogy]

comprising: The Great Fortune; The Spoilt City; Friends and Heroes
London, Heinemann, 1960; 1962; 1965.

3 vols. First editions, first impressions. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jackets, first 2 with price-stickers to inside front flaps.

The Balkan Trilogy is semi-autobiographical, drawing loosely on Olivia Manning’s own wartime experiences with her husband, R. D. “Reggie” Smith, in Romania and Greece during the Second World War. Anthony Burgess, in his Ninety-Nine Novels, called it “probably the most important long work of fiction written by a woman since the war,” adding that it stands as “one of the finest records we have of the impact of that war on Europe.”

Manning continued the story in a second sequence, the ‘Levant Trilogy’ (The Danger Tree, The Battle Lost and Won and The Sum of Things), which follows her recurring couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, on to Egypt as they flee the Nazi advance through the Mediterranean. Together the two trilogies make up the six novels published as Fortunes of War, widely regarded as her masterwork. Adapted for television in 1987.