Time of Hope

The life of Lewis Eliot documented across eleven novels with C. P. Snows distinctive blend of precision and compassion begins in Time of Hope. The novel opens in the summer of 1914 when nine-year-old Lewis hears the news of his fathers bankruptcy, and closes in 1933, when, although hindered in his promising career as a lawyer by the neuroses of his wife, he realises that he cannot bear to leave her. In the course of this ambitious but ultimately unremarkable mans early life rage the great questions of the age questions of class, of gender, of ideology and of war asked and answered with wisdom and tolerance. A meticulous study of the public issues and private problems of post-war Britain, C. P. Snows Strangers and Brothers sequence is a towering achievement that stands alongside Anthony Powells A Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great romans-fleuves of the twentieth century.