While the Music Lasts – serie

WHILE THE MUSIC LASTS is Jim Powell's fourth and most ambitious novel. Spanning four decades and moving between Britain, France and America, it is a timely chronicle of the generation that came of age in the post-war world. They championed freedom, blew the lid off convention and set out to change society - but did they? Published in two volumes, this powerful story captures the zeitgeist of the extraordinary times through which this generation has lived.In the first volume, Starting from Anywhere, we follow the novel's compelling cast of characters, 'baby boomers' taking their first steps into adulthood, moving through 1960s idealism and on to the excesses of the 1980s. The narrator, Tony Gethyn, is the link between them all - from his school friend bound for Vietnam and university friends bound for Parliament and the City to the people who drift in and out of his advertising days in Soho, among them a Washington lobbyist, a Black Country entrepreneur, a Nigerian charity worker, a London tabloid journalist and her broadsheet counterpart in New York. Running through many of these lives, blighting some and unsettling others, is the novel's anti-hero, who represents the worst of 1980s culture.

While the Music Lasts is Jim Powell's fourth and most ambitious novel. Spanning four decades and moving between Britain, France and America, it is a timely chronicle of the generation that came of age in the post-war world. They championed freedom, blew the lid off convention and set out to change society - but did they?Published in two volumes, this powerful story captures the zeitgeist of the extraordinary times through which this generation has lived.The second volume, Arriving Where We Started, opens in New Mexico in 1988, with narrator Tony Gethyn visiting his traumatised Vietnam veteran friend, and later moving to New York. Reflecting the onset of globalisation, some friends from earlier years have moved to New York or visit it often. Among them is the novel's socially dysfunctional anti-hero, now a property tycoon bestriding the global financial markets. Also in New York is someone for whom Tony has long held a candle, first met as a barmaid in a Cambridge pub, now a broadsheet journalist.By the time Tony returns England in 1992, some his friends there have climbed several rungs up the ladders of politics, law, global finance and the media; others have stalled or taken a fall.We follow their triumphs and tragedies through the decade to 9/11 and its reverberations and on to the economic meltdown of 2008.

WHILE THE MUSIC LASTS is Jim Powell's fourth and most ambitious novel. Spanning four decades and moving between Britain, France and America, it is a timely chronicle of the generation that came of age in the post-war world.They championed freedom, blew the lid off convention and set out to change society - but did they?Published in two volumes, this powerful story captures the zeitgeist of the extraordinary times through which this generation has lived. In the first volume, Starting from Anywhere, we follow the novel's compelling cast of characters, 'baby boomers' taking their first steps into adulthood, moving through 1960s idealism and on to the excesses of the 1980s. The narrator, Tony Gethyn, is the link between them all - from his school friend bound for Vietnam and university friends bound for Parliament and the City to the people who drift in and out of his advertising days in Soho, among them a Washington lobbyist, a Black Country entrepreneur, a Nigerian charity worker, a London tabloid journalist and her broadsheet counterpart in New York.Running through many of these lives, blighting some and unsettling others, is the novel's anti-hero, who represents the worst of 1980s culture.