Doves Of Venus

Description

Pretty, Brave and eighteen, Ellie has come to London in search of adventure. She soon finds it in Quintin Bellot, the handsome but tired dilettante who finds her a job in fashionable Chelsea. But Quintin, the seducer of one dove, is also the husband of another. And Petta, his once beautiful wife, is fighting back age as fiercely as Ellie is plunging into it.

Olivia Manning, OBE, was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, spent much of her youth in Ireland, and, as she puts it, had 'the usual Anglo-Irish sense of belonging nowhere'. The daughter of a naval officer, she produced her first novel, The Wind Changes, in 1937. She married just before the War, and went abroad with her husband, R. D. Smith, a British Council lecturer in Bucharest. Her experiences there formed the basis of the work which makes up The Balkan Trilogy. As the Germans approached Athens, she and her husband evacuated to Egypt and ended up in charge of the Palestine Broadcasting Station. They returned to London in 1946 and lived there until her death in 1980.

Olivia Manning has a wonderful and unfailing flair for describing both the atmosphere and the furniture of the world in which her people move * Listener * Manning writes always with a poet's care for words and it is her usual distinction of style and construction that lifts the novel- far, far above the average run * Observer * The most considerable of our women novelists * Anthony Burgess *