Chiselbury Publishing, London, UK, 2025

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Sharp, funny, unsparing … a whole epoch leaps from Powell’s pages“

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.

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 of earlier years now live in 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 friends there have climbed several rungs up the ladders of politics, law, finance and the media; others have stalled or taken a fall. We follow their triumphs and tragedies through to 9/11 and its reverberations and on to the economic meltdown of 2008.

FROM THE REVIEWS  

“Idly, and with a few minutes to spare, I began reading the pre-publication excerpts of While the Music Lasts. Half an hour later I was still reading – gripped, immersed in Jim Powell’s world. Sharp, funny, unsparing, through the lives of his characters a whole epoch leaps from Powell’s pages”
MATTHEW PARRIS, writes for The Times and The Spectator magazine, and broadcasts for the BBC

“A whirl of lives – over forty years – with love, money, jobs and friendships riding the horse of change; a rewarding read.”
KATE ADIE, former Chief News Correspondent for the BBC, radio presenter and bestselling author

“Jim Powell was the epitome of my generation of novelists. His books – and this is no exception – are insightful, gripping, quiet but meaningful. This, his final novel, could have been written by that other Powell, Anthony, and there is no greater endorsement than that.”
RICHARD CHARKIN, Publisher, author and former President of the International Publishers Association

“Bestselling author Jim Powell was a fine writer, and his last novel – covering the rich half-century from the 1960s to the new millennium – is highly ambitious. It follows the interacting, somewhat cosmopolitan lives of some fifteen characters, mostly in Britain, France and America. They come from various backgrounds, they think about class – for this is a very English book – they struggle with jobs, marriage, death and survival. They always engage us. The plot is quiet, the spirit recessional. The structure of the book evokes Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’. Powell is very good at quiet irony; and, evoking the mood of his times, his dialogue is wonderfully authentic.”
EDWARD RUTHERFURD, bestselling author of Sarum and New York

Volume 1, Starting from Anywhere:
ISBN 978-1-917837-08-8 (hardback); 978-1-917837-00-2 (paperback); 978-1-917837-01-9 (epub)

Volume 2, Arriving Where We Started:
ISBN 978-1-917837-09-5 (hardback); 978-1-917837-02-6 (paperback); 978-1-917837-03-3 (epub)