Time at War

Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius’s ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends’ joie de vivre. In this, his second novel — written in the ’50s and never before published — Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.

— A sweeping, comprehensive epic, Hopeful Monsters tells the story of the love affair between Max, an English student of physics and biology, and Eleanor, a German Jewess and political radical. Together and apart, Max and Eleanor participate in the great political and intellectual movements which shape the twentieth century, taking them from Cambridge and Berlin to the Spanish Civil War, Russia, the Sahara, and finally to Los Alamos to witness the first nuclear test.

— Hopeful Monsters received Britain's prestigious Whitbread Award in 1990.

— Praising Mosley's ability to distill complex modes of thought, the New York Times called Hopeful Monsters a "virtual encyclopedia of twentieth century thought, in fictional form".