Time Of Hope — C.P. Snow / Charles Percy Snow

A young man resolves to rise above his humble beginnings in the series praised as a “masterwork . . . a panorama of middle and upper-middle class English society” (The New York Times).

Nine-year-old Lewis Eliot learns that his father is bankrupt in the summer of 1914. This family crisis -- and the tragedy that follows -- shape his future, but with fierce willpower, he diligently studies and eventually finds a promising law career in London. However, that very determination to succeed against difficult odds may prove Eliot's undoing as he courts and marries a troubled, wealthy woman, raising questions of social class, marriage, and the nature of ambition.

“Snow depicted a milieu of which he was an intimate and exhilarating part. [The Strangers and Brothers novels are] precisely, often poetically written books . . . strong on plot and narrative and nuances of power politics.” -- The New York Times

“A sensitive evocation of the early background of Lewis Eliot, Snow's narrator, and with the first stages of the career that is to take him through so many different layers of English society. . . . [The novel] gives a remarkable impression of the world of the law.” -- Commentary