British writer Olivia Manning traveled to the Balkans with her husband at the start of World War II and did not return to England until 1945, moving from Romania to Greece, and from Greece to Egypt. These travels are the subject of her Balkan Trilogy, which Anthony Burgess called the finest account of war in British fiction. Manning never visited battlefields or hospitals, nor did she fight against the regime or the enemy invaders. She tried to build an ordinary life in a world in turmoil, without succumbing to panic. Her heroine, Harriet, is no different—a woman who remains silent and observes rather than acts. In the Balkan Trilogy, around Harriet, through the prism of her thoughts and feelings, readers are presented with a panorama of a specific high society - aristocrats cut off from life, powerless diplomats, bankrupt bankers, confused journalists and simply emigrants who managed to briefly hide from the war and are always ready to tear themselves away again.