Anthony Powell Books in Order

Museum clerk William Atwater moves among artists, acquaintances, and uneasy romantic relationships in late-1920s London. His pursuit of Susan Nunnery joins a wider circle's search for emotional satisfaction in a comedy shaped by disappointment and social observation.

Set in an unnamed Baltic country, this novel follows romantic entanglements and social encounters far from Powell's usual London setting. Comedy and embarrassment accompany dissatisfied lovers, while the unfamiliar surroundings sharpen its examination of manners and human vanity.

Portrait painter Arthur Zouch visits the Passenger family's country estate hoping to improve his prospects. His ambitions collide with another self-styled superior man, turning rural customs, family tensions, and romantic competition into a satire of status and self-importance.

Newly wealthy Blore-Smith is inexperienced enough to attract two opportunistic con artists. Their schemes carry him from London into the galleries and sexual underworlds of continental Europe, exposing the gap between his innocence and their appetite for advantage.

A narrator working in publishing observes the peculiar social life surrounding Judkins and Judkins. Dinner parties and séances bring together awkward combinations of guests, while the book uses the literary business as a setting for comedy about human pretensions.

Powell examines the life of seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey, best known for his biographical sketches in Brief Lives. The biography places his varied scholarly pursuits alongside the friendships and intellectual circles that shaped his work and reputation.

Nicholas Jenkins recalls his schooldays with Charles Stringham and Peter Templer before their lives begin moving in different directions. The opening novel of A Dance to the Music of Time introduces friendships, social distinctions, and ambitions that echo through the sequence.

Leaving school and university behind, Nick Jenkins enters the parties and artistic circles of late-1920s London. Old friends reappear alongside painters and new acquaintances, as his introduction to adult society exposes shifting loyalties, ambitions, and romantic possibilities.

Nick Jenkins continues his account of London life between 1931 and 1933, moving among friends, acquaintances, and artistic interests. The third Dance novel follows changing relationships and social positions as his circle negotiates the uncertainties of early adulthood.

Marriage becomes a central concern among Nick Jenkins's acquaintances in mid-1930s England. Bohemian lives and landed society intersect through courtships, existing unions, and changing careers, while the growth of fascism casts a shadow beyond their immediate social concerns.

Nick Jenkins appears to have found stability in London, but his friends remain unsettled. Composer Hugh Moreland risks his marriage through an affair and Stringham struggles with drinking, while the approach of war makes their futures increasingly uncertain.

Nick Jenkins's memories reach back to childhood before the First World War, then turn toward Britain's entry into another conflict. The sixth Dance novel connects private recollections and familiar social lives with the disruption gathering around the coming war.

Having joined the army, Nick Jenkins enters military life in early 1940. The first wartime Dance novel brings Powell's social observation to soldiers, officers, and institutional routines, tracing the peculiar relationships and follies created by wartime service.

Nick Jenkins remains with his division in Northern Ireland in 1941 while possibilities for another posting emerge. The second wartime Dance novel follows military ambitions and personal encounters against the wider pressures of Britain's experience of the conflict.

Nick Jenkins serves in a Whitehall liaison role with Britain's wartime allies, working with Polish, Belgian, and Czech representatives. The final wartime Dance novel examines official life, literary interests, and social connections during the later years of the conflict.

After the war, Nick Jenkins and his surviving acquaintances attempt to resume civilian life amid austerity. The literary world comes forward through writer X. Trapnel and the magazine Fission, exposing the uncertain relationships and ambitions of postwar publishing.

A literary conference takes Nick Jenkins to Venice, where the lives of old acquaintances remain difficult to escape. Widmerpool's rising public status faces whispered espionage accusations, while interest in the late writer X. Trapnel draws attention to Pamela.

The Fourth Movement gathers Books Do Furnish a Room, Temporary Kings, and Hearing Secret Harmonies. Nick Jenkins returns to civilian literary life after the war, encounters old friends abroad, and observes a changing England as his generation grows older.

Nick and Isobel Jenkins live in the countryside as the sixties bring new cultural currents. Widmerpool continues seeking public influence, while younger people challenge the older generation's world and a wedding gathers familiar faces near the sequence's close.

Powell opens his memoirs with family history, childhood, and education at Eton and Oxford. Recollections of classmates and future writers reveal the early social and intellectual encounters that later helped furnish the world of his fiction.

Beginning with his move to London in 1926, Powell recalls learning publishing at Duckworth and finding his way into literary society. Friendships, parties, artistic influences, and his first novels shape this second volume of his memoirs.

Covering 1934 through the early 1950s, Powell recalls marriage, attempts at film writing, wartime military work, and renewed literary activity. The third memoir volume explores a period whose people and experiences fed into his later fiction.

The final memoir volume follows Powell into country life, magazine work, literary gatherings, and international travel through the 1970s. Anecdotes about acquaintances and professional experiences accompany reflections on the increasing recognition of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Conceited critic and writer G. F. H. Shadbold drifts through marriages while protecting an unflattering version of his own history. This short satirical novel subjects literary vanity and self-deception to reversals of fortune shaped by the past.

This abridged collection brings Powell’s four memoir volumes together, following his education, publishing career, wartime service, and life as a novelist. Portraits of writers and acquaintances connect his personal experiences with the social world explored in his fiction.

On a cruise ship, romance novelist Valentine Beals speculates about a young dancer's devotion to an injured war hero. Gossip and competing explanations draw the couple into comparisons with the Fisher King legend, joining social satire with myth.

This collection brings together four decades of Powell's reviews, humorous journalism, and longer critical essays. His observations on writers, including Aubrey, Kipling, Conrad, and Hardy, combine literary judgment with personal knowledge, anecdote, and an interest in genealogy.

Powell collects reviews of literary biographies, memoirs, and correspondence written across four decades. British authors, Bloomsbury figures, and European writers receive concise assessments that connect the books under review with his wider knowledge of their subjects' lives and work.

This comic literary sequel revisits the world of Lady Chatterley's Lover through a request for a job reference for Mellors. Powell uses the familiar gamekeeper and his former employers to explore respectability, reputation, and the awkwardness of recommendation.

Powell's first journal volume records meetings, travel, parties, and literary observations from 1982 to 1986. Accounts of friends including Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin offer a personal view of his later life, with affectionate but candid judgments.

Writing from his Somerset home, Powell records visits, reading, memories, and literary reflections between 1987 and 1989. Encounters with writers and public figures accompany his return to Shakespeare and a critical rereading of his own novel sequence.

The journals for 1990 to 1992 continue Powell's record of family occasions, notable visitors, and everyday observations. His account of later life combines personal encounters with the attentive social eye familiar from his novels and earlier memoirs.

Published after Powell's death, this notebook gathers observations, wordplay, and fragments collected from life. Some entries later found their way into his fiction, offering a view of the small details and verbal ideas behind his writing.

Powell's collected criticism turns toward poets, painters, sculptors, and less familiar literary figures. Reviews and essays from several publications explore art and artistic reputations, while the comic story A Reference for Mellors adds a fictional response to D. H. Lawrence.

Edited by Robin Bynoe, this collection gathers Powell's contributions to The Compleat Imbiber alongside other writing about food and drink. Pieces by Lady Violet expand the domestic perspective, including memories of buying Bordeaux in barrels and bottling it at home.

The First Movement introduces Nick Jenkins and his circle through A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. School friendships give way to London's parties, artistic connections, romantic interests, and the changing ambitions of early adult life.

The Third Movement collects the wartime novels The Valley of Bones, The Soldier's Art, and The Military Philosophers. Nick Jenkins moves between army postings and official duties, encountering familiar figures and new personalities amid Britain's costly wartime experience.