The Spoilt City

Wonderfully entertaining

Observer

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

Sarah Waters

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 most salute the brilliance ... the exactness of sights and sounds, the precise touches of light and scent, the gestures and entrances.

Guardian

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

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

Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing.

Sunday Telegraph

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

Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse

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