It ought not to be forgotten that Miss Gibbons is a poet as well as a novelist... She sees idiosyncrasy in nature and humanity, and makes both live

Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the 20th century

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.

Wonderfully entertaining

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

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.

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

Glittering characterisation, sharp and eloquent writing

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

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.

Rereleased with glorious new covers ... it's an ambitious and classic series that'll utterly absorb you.