A Buyer's Market — Anthony Powell

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