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.

In this volume, it is about 1958, and narrator Nick Jenkins is a full-on academic, attending a conference in Venice, reflecting on travelling professors' statuses as "Temporary Kings." It isn't long before Pamela Widmerpool arrives in the story and sucks all the air out of the other characters. They all meet while gazing at a painting featuring another King, a scene that Lady Widmerpool finds entirely too relevant.