Books Do Furnish a Room

Description

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic *A Dance to the Music of Time* offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of *Dance* as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.
The tenth volume, *Books Do Furnish a Room* (1971), finds Nick Jenkins and his circle beginning to re-establish their lives and careers in the wake of the war. Nick dives into work on a study of Robert Burton; Widmerpool grapples with the increasingly difficult and cruel Pamela Flitton—now his wife; and we are introduced to the series’ next great character, the dissolute Bohemian novelist X. Trapnel, a man who exudes in equal measure mystery, talent, and an air of self-destruction.
“Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician.”– *Chicago* *Tribune*
“A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell’s world is as large and as complex as Proust’s.”–Elizabeth Janeway, *New York* *Times*
“One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience.”–Naomi Bliven, *New Yorker
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“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”–Kingsley Amis