About the Author

Olivia Manning (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R.D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. During World War II , the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece, then to Egypt, and finally to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later.

Anthony Sattin is a journalist, broadcaster, and former resident of Cairo. Among his published works of nonfiction are The Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile. His latest book, Young Lawrence, about the five years T. E. Lawrence spent in the Middle East before World War I, will be published in the United States in 2015.

Reviews

“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