Starting from Anywhere

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.