Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

The renowned literary saga continues as a group of London friends find domesticity and despair in their love relationships.

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed twelve-volume epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, the fifth book, finds Nick marrying Isobel Tolland and launching happily into family life—including his new role as brother-in-law to Isobel's many idiosyncratic siblings. But even as Nick's life is settling down, those of his friends are full of drama and heartache: his best friend, Hugh Moreland, is risking his marriage on a hopeless affair, while Charles Stringham has nearly destroyed himself with drink.

Full of Powell's typically sharp observations about life and love, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant offers all the rewards and frustrations, pleasures and regrets of one's thirties.

“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

“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.” —New York Times

“One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience.” —New Yorker