The Light Years

Does your heart race with anticipated pleasure when you see not only a list of characters but a family tree on the first pages of a fat novel? If so, prepare to luxuriate, as this is just the first of five volumes in Howard's Cazalet Chronicle (all published after her 65th birthday, late in a glamorous literary life that sometimes overshadowed her writing). The large cast consists of the Cazalets, a family wealthy from the timber trade, and their similarly sized staff of servants, and it's Howard's special genius to be able to inhabit them all (the children especially, in all their fussiness, intelligence, and ignorant charm). What delights me more than anything is the vivid texture of how people lived, how they planned and prepared their meals, picked out their dresses, and arranged their adulteries. This volume is set in the late '30s, as WWII approaches—I look forward to following them, with the series, for two decades more.