Skip to main content

Books Do Furnish a Room

Book 10 of A Dance to the Music of Time

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

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

See all volumes of Dance to the Music of Time.


246 pages | 5 1/4 x 8 | © 1971

Fiction

Table of Contents

Dedication

 1. REVERTING TO THE UNIVERSITY AT forty...

 2. RATHER UNEXPECTEDLY, ERRIDGE WAS FOUND to have paid...

 3. IN THE COURSE OF PRELIMINARY conclaves with Bagshaw...

 4. IN THE NEW YEAR, WITHOUT further compromise...

 5. I LEFT LONDON ONE SATURDAY afternoon in the autumn...
 

Be the first to know

Get the latest updates on new releases, special offers, and media highlights when you subscribe to our email lists!

Sign up here for updates about the Press