Balkan Trilogy

The British writer Olivia Manning came to the Balkans with her husband at the beginning of World War II and did not return to England until 1945, moving from Romania to Greece, and from Greece to Egypt. Her Balkan Trilogy is dedicated to these wanderings, which Anthony Burgess called the best testimony about the war in British fiction.

Manning had neither been on the battlefield nor in hospitals, she did not fight against the regime or enemy invaders. She tried to build an ordinary life in a shaking world, not succumbing to panic. 

Such is her heroine Harriet – a woman who prefers to remain silent and observe rather than act. In the "Balkan Trilogy," around Harriet, through the prism of her thoughts and feelings, readers discover a panorama of a specific secular society – detached aristocrats, powerless diplomats, bankrupt bankers, bewildered journalists, and simply emigrants who managed to briefly hide from the war and were always ready to flee again.