Arriving Where We Started

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.

The second volume, Arriving Where We Started, opens in New Mexico in 1988, with narrator Tony Gethyn visiting his traumatised Vietnam veteran friend, and later moving to New York. Reflecting the onset of globalisation, some friends from earlier years have moved to New York or visit it often. Among them is the novel's socially dysfunctional anti-hero, now a property tycoon bestriding the global financial markets. Also in New York is someone for whom Tony has long held a candle, first met as a barmaid in a Cambridge pub, now a broadsheet journalist.

By the time Tony returns England in 1992, some his friends there have climbed several rungs up the ladders of politics, law, global finance and the media; others have stalled or taken a fall.

We follow their triumphs and tragedies through the decade to 9/11 and its reverberations and on to the economic meltdown of 2008.

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.