A smart, transporting series for these times

And some breaking news about the Cazalets

A friend recently asked me to recommend a book that she could escape into the same way she’d burrowed into the BCC Pride and Prejudice during the past week. I made a few quick suggestions (The Covenant of Water, Fellowship Point), when an even more immersive idea came to mind: the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. “What’s that?” she asked. What a joy when you recommend a beloved book to someone who not only hasn’t read it, but hasn’t heard of it!

The Cazalet Chronicles is a series of five books, written between 1990 and 2013, that trace the fortunes of an upper-middle-class English family starting in 1937. One critic hailed the first volume, The Light Years, as “a wonderful old stuffed sofa of a book,” which I guess is a very nice way of saying that it’s transporting in the coziest of ways. But don’t mistake these books as fluff. Hilary Mantel, who called the Cazalet Chronicles “panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling,” said that there was no author she’d recommended more often than Elizabeth Jane Howard. She wrote:

“Why should I care, some readers ask, about the trials of the affluent? But readers who do not care about rich characters do not care about poor ones either. Howard’s novels can be resisted by those who see the surface and find it bourgeois. They can be resisted by those who do not like food, or cats, or children, or ghosts, or the pleasures of pinpoint accuracy in observation of the natural or manufactured world: by those who turn a cold shoulder to the recent past. But they are valued by those open to their charm, their intelligence and their humour, who can listen to messages from a world with different values from ours.”

Need I say more?

I can’t remember if my sister Laura discovered these novels and shared them with me or if I found them first, but either way, we devoured them and didn’t want them to end. Here’s our copy of The Light Years, which has been residing on my book shelf since we read it decades ago. The pages are crinkled, no doubt from having been devoured in the bath (as good as an old stuffed couch any day).

I can’t wait to tell Laura what was announced today: Howard’s niece, the author Louisa Young, will write the sixth, seventh, and eighth volumes of the Cazalet Chronicles, picking up the saga in Christmas 1962 and traveling through the following two decades. The books will be published by Mantle, the imprint of Pan Macmillan that publishes the original Cazalet books. It’s a daunting task, but Young seems like she may be up to the task: she’s not only lived with the Cazalet characters all her life, but is the author of 15 books, including the novel Baby Love, which was longlisted for the Orange prize for fiction (now the Women’s prize),

The first (or sixth) book, The Golden Hours, will be published in September 2026, which gives you less than a year to read the first five books. I promise you’ll be done with them way before you want to be.

Have you read the Cazalet Chronicles? Can you recommend any other “wonderful old stuffed sofa” books? The need is vast, so please share in the comments!