Well, two of the three are, "A Buyer's Market" and "the Acceptance World". This is a long novel in twelve volumes presenting a picture of upper middle class, somewhat artistic, British Life, from the 1920's into the 1960's. There is gentle fun, and an insightful mind at work. The two most remembered characters are Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, and Kenneth Widmerpool, a perpetual outsider. The twelve sections were not an instant classic, but are well thought of, by their generation. the characters become gradually part of one's mental life, which was of course, the point. Powell became a long time pillar of the literary world and ended his epic in 1974. ( )

"This is perhaps an image of how we live."

The first three novels in this 12-volume series: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market and The Acceptance World, tracing the lives of the young male protagonists from their final year in school in the early 1920s to their years after university, discovering love, career, hope, loss, jealousy, society, and art.

Consistently enjoyable in its recreation of a world that for Powell was already his long-lost youth, and for my generation seems impossibly distant.

These first three volumes are the least exciting in the series, for my money, although the moments of high comedy often shine. But they gain much from the resonances they will leave for the remainder of the series. Perhaps now that I'm so abysmally old (gosh, nearing my mid-30s), I understand all the more how crucial, how seminal, how heartbreakingly eternal are the loves and joys of our youth. ( )

I am trying to read the whole series over the course of a year by reading one volume each month. This book collects the first 3 volumes. There is a fairly vast number of characters already, but the rather deadpan and detached narrator keeps it all manageable. Each book really seems to constitute around 3 or 4 long chapters, each one describing at length some sort of social event in the narrators life. I'm really enjoying these glimpses into British life in the 1920s and 1930s amongst quite a mix of upper class and more bohemian society. The comparison to Proust is clear and maybe a more English take on that is just what I needed. These are also much quicker to read due to being composed of sentences of a normal length.

I did a re-read of this for a book group discussion, and really enjoyed returning to it - having now read the whole series I could spot characters who become important in the future. I'm not sure I'll go back through all of it, but maybe... ( )

A perceptive writer and an easy read, although the book requires some thought here and there, in order for the reader to fully appreciate the author's insights into character.
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Add another star if you are an Anglophile, or are interested in England between the wars, or are old enough to reminisce about those years.

Remove a star if you are young and don't care about those years in England. ( )

Who knew that youth was so couth? ( )