The Spoilt City

It is 1940, and Guy and Harriet Pringle and their friends in the English colony in Bucharest find their position growing ever more precarious. The phoney war is over and invasion by the Germans is an ever-present threat...

This is the second part of The Balkan Trilogy, which began with The Great Fortune and concludes with Friends and Heroes.

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth and spent much of her youth in Ireland. She married just before the Second World War and went abroad with her husband, a British Council lecturer in Bucharest. Her experiences there formed the basis of the work which makes up The Balkan Trilogy. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there 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.