A Buyer's Market

Second in the universally acclaimed epic, A Dance to the Music of Time, that’s been released as it was originally published, as twelve individual novels.

This second volume, A Buyer’s Market (1952), finds young Nick Jenkins struggling to establish himself in London. Amid the fever of the 1920s, he attends formal dinners and wild parties; makes his first tentative forays into the worlds of art, culture, and bohemian life; and suffers his first disappointments in love. Old friends come and go, but the paths they once shared are rapidly diverging: Stringham is settling into a life of debauchery and drink, Templer is plunging into the world of business, and Widmerpool, though still a figure of out-of-place grotesquerie, remains unbowed, confident in his own importance and eventual success. A Buyer’s Market is a striking portrait of the pleasures and anxieties of early adulthood, set against a backdrop of London life and culture at one of its most effervescent moments.

“I think it is now becoming clear that A Dance to the Music of Time is going to become the greatest modern novel since Ulysses.” —Clive James

“Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician.” —Chicago Tribune

“A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's.” —Elizabeth Janeway, The New York Times

“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.” —Kingsley Amis