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“She draws from her own family story. It’s all true to life. She was born in the 1920s to a family that was affluent and well-connected, and totally, totally unhappy…The dialogue in these books is incredible. Especially the children, she writes children’s dialogue so acutely, so well…again, it’s the details…How people eat: whether someone passes the gravy or just pours it all onto their own plate. That can be as clear an indication of character as whether they were fascist or not, or whether they supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy or not…With The Cazalet Chronicles, it’s the afterlife of lies and mistakes, that ripples through lives—their own, and their family members’…In a series of novels, there is opportunity for these things to breathe, to happen as if in real-time. It’s not compressed into a single novel. So you can see the distance between cause and consequence. As a result, it feels that much truer to life. Hilary Mantel described how the book charted the varying and repeating errors of this one family; I think that’s a good way to describe it.” Read more...
The best books on Family History
Thea Lenarduzzi, Journalist
Howard is most famous for writing a loosely autobiographical set of novels called The Cazalet Chronicles, about a family during World War II and then post-war Sussex. It’s such a beautiful collection; she handled this wonderful cast of characters with great beauty and aplomb and insight………I interviewed her, and we had lunch after that and I got to know her a bit. She was so wonderful, but still didn’t believe that she was worth much even though at that time she was undergoing a critical re-evaluation and they were dramatising the Cazelet Chronicles for Radio 4. And I’m glad to say she did get a level of success just before she died.
The best books on Coping With Failure recommended by Elizabeth Day
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