The Light Years - Paperback

by Elizabeth Jane Howard (Author)

This first novel in the beloved Cazalet Chronicles books introduces us to a multigenerational aristocratic English family--and the tangled lives of their in-laws, children, and servants--as their country teeters on the brink of World War II.

From the opening scene--the maids, in their thin flannel nightdresses, rising at dawn to prepare the family's morning tea--we are irresistibly drawn into the Cazalets' intimate world.

In 1937, the coming war is only a distant cloud on the horizon. As the various Cazalet households prepare for their summer pilgrimage to the family estate in the Sussex countryside, we meet hearty Edward, in love with but by no means faithful to his good wife, Villy; Hugh, wounded in the Great War, devoted to pregnant Sybil; Rupert, who worships the body if not the mind of his demanding wife, Zoe; and Rachel, the unmarried sister, conducting a desperate clandestine love affair under the family roof.

"Vivid and compulsively readable" (Sunday Telegraph), this is a masterpiece in the tradition of Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Jane Howard was a highly acclaimed English novelist, as well as an actress, model, and playwright. In 1951 she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit. Six books followed before she wrote her best-known work, The Cazalet Chronicles, a five-part bestselling series about a multigenerational family during wartime Britain. All novels--The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change--have become modern classics and were adapted into a major BBC radio and TV series.