While the Music Lasts: by Dr. Jim Powell (1968)

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 met the diverse cast of characters, many of them ‘baby boomers’ taking their first steps into adulthood. Through the novel’s narrator, Tony Gethyn, we followed their intertwined lives from 1960s idealism to the excesses of the 1980s.

This second volume, ‘Arriving Where We Started’, opens in New Mexico in 1988, with Tony 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, Damir Steggles, 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, with Damir Steggles anticipating ruin.

If you’re looking for a story that is simultaneously life-affirming, heart-breaking and funny, While the Music Lasts is that story.