Overview

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.

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9781917837088

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Jim Powell was born in London in 1949. He was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he obtained a Master's degree in history. In 2018, he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Liverpool. A direct descendant of the 19th century novelist Thomas Love Peacock, he was amongst the 'Twelve of the Best New Novelists' chosen by BBC2's 'The Culture Show' in 2011. His first novel, The Breaking of Eggs, dealt with the impact of fascism and communism on 20th century Europe. His second novel, Trading Futures, related the desperate, sometimes hilarious, mid-life crisis of a 60-year-old City trader; it was serialised on BBC Radio 4's 'Book at Bedtime', read by Toby Jones. His third novel, Things We Nearly Knew, was set at an unspecified time in a bar in an unnamed small town in America. His historical work, Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War, based on his PhD thesis, was published by Liverpool University Press. After Cambridge, Jim went into advertising, becoming the Managing Director of the London office of a major American company. He then moved into ceramics, setting up pottery factories in Northamptonshire and Stoke-on-Trent to produce hand-painted tableware for top UK and international stores. Some products are exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Jim was active in politics for many years, running election campaigns for Francis Pym and Leon Brittan and collaborating with Pym on his bestselling book, The Politics of Consent. He contested the 1987 General Election in Coventry and was later Deputy Leader of Daventry District Council. Jim's wife, Kay, is the author of What Not to Write, a bestselling guide to written English, and Then a Wind Blew, a novel set during the 1970s Rhodesia/Zimbabwe war. Until Jim's death in May 2023, they divided their time between their cottage near Cambridge and their house in south-west France.

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