Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune (1960) is the first novel in her masterly series of six (The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy), the most underrated novels of the twentieth century. Like Tolstoy in War and Peace and Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Manning created characters swept up in a cataclysmic European war, and her descriptions of battle and the suffering of civilians are as thrilling and poignant as those of her great predecessors. Though the core of the novel focuses on the developing relationship of a young married couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, they are surrounded by a cast of fascinating minor characters, a shifting society of locals and expatriates. The world-shaking events around them form a dramatic counterpoint to their lives. The story is told through the eyes of Harriet, and her struggle to adapt to life with Guy continues throughout the six novels in the series. Ultimately, they are forced to flee the German invaders from the Balkans into Greece, Egypt, and Palestine, but the tale of their year in Bucharest establishes the essential conflict between them.

One of the very few novels in English set in Romania, The Great Fortunebegins in 1939, when Guy Pringle returns to the capital with his new wife in order to resume his job as a university lecturer. Manning based the story on her own experience, when she went to Bucharest with her husband, Reggie Smith, a