The Light Years
The Beloved First Instalment in The Cazalet Chronicles
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
‘Maybe my favourite books ever’ – Marian Keyes
Told with exceptional grace, The Light Years is a modern classic of twentieth-century English life and is the first novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s extraordinary, bestselling family saga, The Cazalet Chronicles.
‘They drove past fields of wheat with poppies . . . through woods of oak and Spanish chestnut . . . and hedges decorated by the last of the dog-roses bleached nearly white by the sun . . . ‘Oh, this country!’ he said . . . ‘To me, it is the best in England.’
1937. Every summer, the Cazalet brothers – Hugh, Edward and Rupert – return to the family home in the heart of the Sussex countryside with their wives and children. There, they join their parents and unmarried sister Rachel to enjoy two blissful months at Home Place. But despite the idyllic setting, nothing can be done to soothe the siblings’ heartache.
Hugh is haunted by the ravages of the Great War. Edward is torn between his familial duties and his relationships that lie outside of the home. Rupert is in turmoil over his inability to please his new wife. Meanwhile, Rachel risks losing her only chance at happiness because of her unflinching loyalty to the family.
As the world they had known begins to slip away, this is the story of one family facing up to immense change – in themselves, and in the world.
‘Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles is a series of five novels, but it’s so compulsive a saga that surely it counts as one work . . . vast in its scope, minute in its detail and utterly charming, it bears reading again and again’ – Gill Hornby, bestselling author of Miss Austen
‘She helps us to do the necessary thing – open our eyes and our hearts’ – Hilary Mantel, bestselling author of Wolf Hall
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her charming but unwieldy eighth novel, the author of Odd Girl Out and Getting It Right portrays three generations of an upper-class English family summering at their Sussex estate in 1937 and 1938. The daily concerns of the Cazalet patriarch, his four children, nine grandchildren, countless in-laws, servants and pets range from the mundane to the seriously significant: the children rescue their cat from a tree, the chauffeur drives too slowly, the adults discuss the prospect of war. The temptations of adultery and incest that lurk beneath the chitchat rarely threaten the comfortable routine. Howard's attempts at insightful characterization, suspenseful plot development and sweeping depiction of an era achieve only partial success, due to the sheer size of the cast and the continual introduction of subplots thereafter neglected. For hundreds of breezy but disappointingly ``light'' pages, Howard sets the stage for climactic events that never occur. The fan of sagas full of slice-of-life detail may find the book too short, while the lover of catharsis will feel it stops short of its goal. In either case, another installment is required.
