“So many people have written and claimed that their families were the original of the Forsytes,” wrote Galsworthy, “that one has almost been encouraged to believe in the typicality of an imagine species.” It is the Spring of 1920, 34 years on from the beginning of the Saga. “Young Jolyon” is married to Irene after her divorce from Soames, and they now have a son, Jon. Soames has re-married and has a daughter, Fleur. A new generation of Forsytes comes of age and the Saga continues.

The three novels that make up this trilogy have long been recognized as masterpieces of 20th-century literature, and Galsworthy as one of its leading exponents. But don’t let that be the reason you put off listening to this wonderful work. There are passion and lust in these pages, high art and low comedy, and unthinking violence that ride alongside ever-correct manners. Scandal, tragedy, despair, rape, accidental death, marriage, remarriage and a healthy leavening of births all unfold against a rolling backdrop of a world war.

Galsworthy¿s masterly portrait of the Forsyte family continues here with the fifth novel, The Silver Spoon, coming second in the second trilogy, called A Modern Comedy.

The White Monkey is the fourth of the nine novels in The Forsyte Chronicles and marks the opening of the second trilogy in the series, called A Modern Comedy. In this new chapter, Fleur and Michael Mont begin to question their marriage when their good friend, author Wilfred Desert, can no longer contain his passion for Fleur. Fleur finds herself torn between her love for Michael and passion for Wilfred.

The "man of property", Soames Forsyte, has mellowed with the passing of the years until, in his old age, he is a patient and benign figure, guarding with especial tenderness the welfare of his daughter, Fleur. But all his watchfulness and devotion are powerless to avert tragedy when Fleur revives her old love affair with Jon Forsyte on Jon's return to England with his American wife.

The Man of Property, the first novel in Galsworthy's epic social satire The Forsyte Saga, introduces us to Soames Forsyte, a solicitor and prominent man of his important family. Accustomed to getting whatever he wants, he sets his sights with absolute determination on the beautiful Irene, in spite of her pennilessness and her indifference to him.

Dorothea Brooke is an ardent idealist who represses her vivacity and intelligence for the cold, theological pedant Casaubon. One man understands her true nature: the artist Will Ladislaw. But how can love triumph against her sense of duty and Casaubon’s mean spirit? Meanwhile, in the little world of Middlemarch, the broader world is mirrored: the world of politics, social change, and reforms, as well as betrayal, greed, blackmail, ambition, and disappointment.

In this world of bribes, vendettas, and swindling, in which heiresses are gambled and won, Trollope's characters embody all the vices: Lady Carbury is 'false from head to foot'; her son Felix has 'the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog'; and Melmotte - the colossal figure who dominates the book - is a 'horrid, big, rich scoundrel...a bloated swindler...a vile city ruffian'. But as vile as he is, he is considered one of Trollope's greatest creations.

Barchester Towers, Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire. Trollope continues the story, begun in The Warden, of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor.

The Man of Property, the first in the long series of novels written by John Galsworthy known as the Forsyte Saga, was written in 1906. It was the second novel that Galsworthy had published under his own name, the four novels previous to this being published privately under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. And, unlike its predecessors, it was a great success. It examined and dissected the habits, manners, snobberies and increasingly suffocating moral code of the upper-middle classes to which he belonged.