The Valley of Bones

Nick Jenkins joins the British Army and is posted to a company of men who share almost nothing but their uniform. Among them are a banker, a miner, a clerk and a young priest. Nick narrates in the first person, so everything arrives through his eyes.

His tone is wry and detached, and it turns the disorder of army life into an observation of class, friendship and lost innocence. The novel watches how combat changes each man in the company, and none of them stays quite as he began.

The book is the first of three war-set novels in Anthony Powell's long, decades-spanning series A Dance to the Music of Time. Its title and opening chapter take their cue from the biblical vision of the Valley of Dry Bones.

The structure falls into four distinct sections. They build toward the unexpected appearance of a character from an earlier volume. Reading it means following a war told through character and social detail, with an ironic observer at its centre.