Orlando Trilogy

Bloomsbury presents Orlando King by Isabel Colegate, read by Antonia Beamish.

The masterpiece of one of the most important and overlooked British women writers of the 20th century, with a new introduction by Melissa Harrison.

Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of fascism casting an ever lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of politics, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife and a seat in parliament. But the advent of war brings with it Orlando’s downfall, and his daughter Agatha, cloistered with him in his banishment, is left to pick through the rubble of his smoking, ruined legacy.

Elegant and muscular, powerful and razor-sharp, Orlando King is a bildungsroman, Greek tragedy and political saga all in one: a glittering exorcism of the inter-war generation’s demons to rival the work of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.