“Fantastically tart and readable.”
—Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet
“The metaphorical war between the sexes is amplified by the nonmetaphorical war raging all around. . . . It was Manning’s ability to paint the complex relationship between gender and power with wit and sensitivity in her wartime novels that makes her an important 20th century writer.”
—Lauren Elkin, The Daily Beast
“Two qualities are special to Fortunes of War—the wideness of its panorama and its author’s temerity. No experience, civilian or military, fazes Manning. Equally at home in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, she manages to convince the reader that the pageantry and misery of the world are as mutual as her view of them is trustworthy.”
—Howard Moss, The New York Review of Books
“The finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer.”
—Anthony Burgess
“A tour de force . . . a picture of the Middle East in wartime that we shall want to look at again and again.”
—The Listener
“How many Americans who have read Barbara Pym, Beryl Bainbridge, or Iris Murdoch have ever heard of Olivia Manning? Yet she is one of the most gifted English writers of her generation…. Nobody has written better about World War II—the feel of fighting it and its dislocating effects on ordinary, undistinguished lives.”
—Eve Auchincloss, The New York Times
“Olivia Manning’s greatest achievements are the Balkan and Levant novels. In these she handles her daunting wealth of material with great artistic dexterity and an admirable sense of proportion that at the same time never reduces. Nor does her concern to understand public events impair her analytical comprehension of the private lives of her people . . . Olivia Manning wrote as courageously about death and the fear of death—in combat, in accident, through disease, through age—as any novelist in our language this century.”
—Paul Binding, New Statesman
“But also the unobtrusiveness of this unforgettable book is a function of Olivia Manning’s style. At first one wonders, ‘Why doesn’t she write more?’ for this is a very austere and self-denying manner. But gradually we become aware that she doesn’t need to ‘write,’ to make things up to beguile us, because what she has so powerfully observed is true, and she has set it down without fuss.”
—Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
“These books are clearly among the very best fiction about the Second World War. They are written with the English poise and understatement that Jane Austen raised to its highest art form.”
—Chris Patten, The Sunday Times
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