Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.

The ninth volume, The Military Philosophers (1968), takes the series through the end of the war. Nick has found a place, reasonably tolerable by army standards, as an assistant liaison with foreign governments in exile. But like the rest of his countrymen, he is weary of life in uniform and looking ahead to peacetime. Until then, however, the fortunes of war continue to be unpredictable: more names are cruelly added to the bill of mortality, while other old friends and foes prosper. Widmerpool becomes dangerously entranced by the beautiful, fascinating, and vicious Pamela Flitton; and Nick’s old flame Jean Duport makes a surprising reappearance. Elegiac and moving, but never without wit and perception, this volume wraps up Powell’s unsurpassed treatment of England’s finest yet most costly hour.