Strangers and Brothers

Strangers and Brothers is a series of novels by C. P. Snow, published between 1940 and 1970. They deal with – among other things – questions of political and personal integrity, and the mechanics of exercising power.

All eleven novels in the series are narrated by the character Lewis Eliot. The series follows his life and career from humble beginnings in an English provincial town, to reasonably successful London lawyer, to Cambridge don, to wartime service in Whitehall, to senior civil servant and finally retirement.

The New Men deals with the scientific community's involvement in (and reaction to) the development and deployment of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. Conscience of the Rich concerns a wealthy, Anglo-Jewish merchant-banking family. Time of Hope and George Passant depict the price paid by clever, poor young men to escape their provincial origins.

Snow analyses the professional world, scrutinising microscopic shifts of power within the enclosed settings of a Cambridge college, a Whitehall ministry, a law firm. Snow's novelistic world resembles the "classical" detective story, which needs to exclude as many variables as possible from the problem (a passing stranger cannot be the murderer - it has to be one of the houseguests). Snow's fiction similarly contains his characters in the smallest possible area of operation, with no appeal to outside.

For example, in the novels set in the Cambridge college (a thinly-veiled Christ's), a small, disparate group of men is typically required to reach a collective decision on an important subject. In The Masters, the dozen or so college members elect a new head (the Master) by majority vote. In The Affair, a small group of dons sets out to correct a possible injustice: they must convince the rest of the college to re-open an investigation into scientific fraud. In both novels, the characters strongly resist letting in the external world, whether it be the press, public opinion, the college "Visitor", or outside experts.

The books are, in order of the narrative (which differs from publication order):

• Time of Hope (1949)
• George Passant (first called Strangers and Brothers) (1940)
• The Conscience of the Rich (1958)
• The Light and the Dark (1947)
• The Masters (1951)
• The New Men (1954)
• Homecomings (1956)
• The Affair (1960)
• Corridors of Power (1964)
• The Sleep of Reason (1968)
• Last Things (1970)