Elizabeth Jane Howard

The long, dark days of struggle provide the background to this book in the Cazalet Chronicle. As the war enters its fourth year, chaos has become a way of life, as the family find the battle for survival echoes the confusion in their lives.

It is the 1950s and as the Cazalets beloved matriarch, the Duchy, passes away, she takes with her the last remnants of a world of great houses and servants, of class and tradition in which the Cazalets have thrived. Louise, now divorced, becomes entangled in a painful affair, while Polly and Clary must balance marriage and motherhood with their own

By 1939, the sunlit days of childish games are over as the shadows of war cloud the lives of an English family. At the family home, the windows are blacked out, food is scarce, and a new generation of Cazalets take up the story.

Henry Kent has been looking for someone. Anyone will do, as long as she is female, preferably with some money. But when writer Daisy Langrish buys a cottage close by he arouses her agent's suspicions, who discovers a chilling secret.

Anne and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a charming house. They are content, complete, absorbed in their private idyll. Arabella, who comes to stay one lazy summer, is rich, rootless and amoral - and, as they find out, beautiful and loving. With her elegant prose the author traces the web of love and desire that entangles these three; but it is Arabella who finally loses out.