The Great Fortune

It was a strange, uncertain world that Harriet entered when she married Guy Pringle. Guy taught English at the university at Bucharest, a city of vivid contrasts, where professional beggars exist alongside the excesses of mid-European royalty and expatriate journalists with a taste for truffles and quails in aspic. Underlying this is a fitful awareness of the proximity of the Nazi threat to a Romania which is enjoying an uneasy peace. In this exotic landscape Harriet gets to know her new husband and to wonder at the complexity of the apparently simple man she had married.

Born in Portsmouth, Olivia Manning spent much of her youth in Ireland. In 1939 she married a British Council lecturer and joined him in Bucharest just as World War II broke out. Her wartime experiences form the basis of The Balkan Trilogy, of which The Great Fortune is the first volume. The Mannings found themselves evacuated to Athens, Egypt and finally Jerusalem. In 1946 they returned to London where Olivia Manning lived until her death in 1980.

Awarded the CBE, Harriet Walter has received the Olivier Award for her roles in Twelfth Night, Three Sisters and A Question of Geography, and has twice won the Sony Radio Award for Best Actress. Her many TV credits include Law & Order: UK, Little Dorrit, Doctors, Trial & Retribution and Messiah. Among her films are Atonement and Sense and Sensibility, and her autobiography, Other People's Shoes, was published to great critical acclaim.