A Romantic Hero by Olivia Manning
A volume of 14 stories by the author of "The Balkan Trilogy", "The Doves of Venus" and "The Rainforest". They include portraits of adult relationships, black comedies of domestic deadlock and haunting tales of lonely childhoods.
Olivia Manning (1908-1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R.D. Reggie Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. During World War II, the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece, then to Egypt, and finally to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later. Anthony Sattin is a journalist, broadcaster, and former resident of Cairo. Among his published works of nonfiction are The Gates of Africa and A Winter on the Nile. His latest book, Young Lawrence, about the five years T. E. Lawrence spent in the Middle East before World War I, will be published in the United States in 2015.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780749311995 |
| ISBN 10 | 0749311991 |
| Title | A Romantic Hero |
| Author | Olivia Manning |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Cornerstone |
| Year published | 1992-08-06 |
| Number of pages | 35 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |