A Dance to the Music of Time: Autumn

This seasonal grouping covers the seventh, eighth, and ninth novels of Powell's twelve-book sequence narrated by Nicholas Jenkins. The action runs through the Second World War: Jenkins serves as a second lieutenant and staff officer, encountering old schoolfellows and London acquaintances in uniform. Kenneth Widmerpool rises through military bureaucracy; other figures from the pre-war salons reappear in camps, offices, and bombed streets. The books attend to posting, rank, and the comic and bleak collisions of civilian personality with army life. Autumn here means middle age and wartime, not a separate story: it continues the same social chronicle from a point when the dance is conducted under blackout.

Bound in buckram with gold lettering on spine and cover picture. Dark purple slipcase.