Strangers and Brothers
by Charles Percy Snow
Category: Great Britain

C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers is a roman fleuve comprising eleven novels and covering a period of more than fifty years. The entire sequence is narrated by Lewis Eliot, an intelligent, sensitive, and decent man whose life progresses against the backdrop of some of the critical events of twentieth century history. The sequence is divided into novels of "direct experience" and "observed experience." Although Lewis Eliot is present in the novels of "observed experience," his personal life is given a secondary role, as he concentrates on several figures who have played crucial roles in his life. Snow carefully establishes his narrator's emotional makeup in Time of Hope (which, though Snow's third book in the series, precedes George Passant and The Light and the Dark in the narrative chronology). Set primarily in an unnamed provincial town in the Midlands of England, the novel depicts Lewis' early years, characterized by a sense of insecurity stemming from the Eliot family's genteel poverty following the bankruptcy of his father during World War I. -- From https://www.enotes.com/topics/strangers-brothers (Feb. 25, 2019).